Antispam - employee's

Tue Jul 15 11:10:46 PDT 2003

On Tue, Jul 15, 2003 at 04:38:26AM -0700, Alvin Oga wrote:
> 
> On Mon, 14 Jul 2003, Rick Moen wrote:
> 
> > Quoting Alvin Oga (alvin at Mail.Linux-Consulting.com):
> > 
> > > we(i) don't want tens/hundreds/thousands of users playing with their
> > > own flavor of spam filters ??
> > 
> > And why not?  It's their mail.  
> 
> the other people in the corp has other things to do than
> to fiddle with their spam filters ...
> 	- most all spam should be removed within a few seconds of
> 	work on the mta ...  instead of few seconds or days
> 	of spam filter fiddling at each client's box
> 	( desktop, laptop, home, traveling laptop, etc )

macro logic can be applied.

It may well be that anything offering to sell something to the
engineering department should be routed to a purchasing manager of some
sort.  That this will include numerous obvious spam as well as vendors
trying to sneak in via a backdoor^Wfriendly introduction, is immaterial.

But unless your corp is big enough to have split down to sub-MTAs per
dept, this is something you are not going to inflict on the top brass
who have purchasing powers.

That any given person's "personal filters" may be administered by a
geek^IT staffer assigned to their department instead of the person
themselves, is a feature for us, and a friendlier interface to the 
computer for that soul who has other work to do.

> whether corp email is "their mail" or corp mail and corp IP is
> a separate issue ...
> 	- i say anything done at company time, company property
> 	and company topics/subjects is company's responsibilities

But the company is not an amorphous blob;  different plans need to be
applied at different places.  Even for companies who feel this way.
The alternative is that anyone who's allowed to mail inward (they 
beat the MTA) may bother anyone in the company equally.

> and if they say, they didnt get an important email from tom at some
> customer site.. than what broke ??? 
> 	- the mta  or the clients additional spam filters ?

If you suspect your MTA, time to read the mail logs :) 

That's why perosnal spam filters should refile, not be trusted to junk
things on their own.

I understand it can be even trickier to debug mta-side filtering, unless
it's as plain as a boolean, they are allowed or not.   But that's not
enough;  context means something, and having either a mail agent or an
mua-level filter (builtin or not) understand that context takes time.
Go to far and you've made an AI that needs retraining the minute you
hire someone new into your department or company.

Me, I find it easier to debug procmail at an individual account, where
the log isn't insanely huge.

> 	- if other people at the corp got emails from the same customer
> 	site at roughly the same time, than the client's additional
> 	spam filters is suspect ...

True.

> just trying to prevent "it works for me and fails for tom, dick and harry"
> and there's lots of individuals
> 	- i prefer the it works for all or fails for all approach instead
> 	of tweeking for each user

When your site contains 3 valid destinations and maybe a dozen addresses
you can do this.  It doesn't scale up very well.  And then we have this
"L" in BayLISA...

  . | .   Heather Stern                  |         star at starshine.org
--->*<--- Starshine Technical Services - * - consulting at starshine.org
  ' | `   Sysadmin Support and Training  |        (800) 938-4078