[lug] Getting mail out of the Qwest/MSN mire

[Sean Reifschneider]

On Sun, Jul 09, 2006 at 09:07:33PM -0600, Bear Giles wrote:
>Individuals won't switch.  But companies may look at the perceived 
>benefit (ability to withdraw messages, confirmation that messages were 

My point was, for the company to have the option to switch, their software
vendors are going to have to provide them with the software that can do it.
In a small organization, like tummy.com, that only involves getting
postfix, mutt, and Vmail (I think) to support it.  However, we aren't
likely to exert pressure, as users, to make many other people switch
because of perceived value.

A large company is likely to have more pressure, but they're also likely to
have to have many more vendors provide the new protocol, making it less
likely to succeed.

I mean, we haven't even managed to implement DomainKeys or similar, and
barely have made progress with SPF, let alone a slightly enhanced SMTP that
supports some of the most glaring problems.  If we can't do these small
things, how are we going to make a huge change?  And is it really going to
help?  If we have to rely on the owners of spam sending machines to pull
them offline quickly, I'm not sure the new infrastructure is really going
to help that much...

>Second, a SMTP blacklist can only handle messages sent in the future.  A 

Not entirely true.  There's nothing to stop you from re-running the
blacklisting at a later date, say in your mail reader.  Or DCC/Razor
checks or similar.  I thought about re-running RBL checks years ago, but in
the end I abandoned RBLs as anything other than helping the weighting on
SpamAssassin.  Using an RBL as an all or nothing measure is very
troublesome.

However, I've been toying with the idea of using addresses I have which
ONLY get spam to generate a blacklist in realtime.  Checking this regularly
after delivery could be quite useful if they hit my real account before
they hit the others.  It's a good idea, in some cases.

Thanks,
Sean
-- 
 "The phrase ``ship it!'' is one with long and deep resonances in my
 benighted and antiquated big-software-dept career." -- John Shipman, 1998
Sean Reifschneider, Member of Technical Staff <jafo at tummy.com>
tummy.com, ltd. - Linux Consulting since 1995: Ask me about High Availability