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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical RE: comast email issues, who else has them?
On Thu, 31 Aug 2006, Tony Li wrote: Patient: Doctor, Doctor, It hurts when I do this.I've taken the rather extreme approach of bouncing everything through Gmail first. Let's see them block Google. ;-) Doctor: Don't do that. There are lots of Mail Service Providers. AOL, Comcast, Gmail, Yahoo, Outblaze, whoever, each have their own quirks and problems. All have blocked various sources including each other at one time or another. Some people complain about some of the decisions made by each of them; while other people applaud the same decisions. Perhaps people are using the wrong tools to solve the problems? Trying to forward from one account to another through spam filters is probably not a good idea, especially since the primary filtering mechanism used by most anti-spam technologies is based on the connecting host. You generally can't "trust" the originating IP address information of other hops, if they are even present. For example, Gmail doesn't include the originating IP address in its email which makes it even more difficult for spam filters to judge its reputation. If a system forwards unfiltered e-mail in today's Internet, it is forwarding spam, viruses, and other malicious stuff, and will likely continue to trip defensive controls on systems. Different tools such as fetchmail, multi-mailbox POP/IMAP clients, etc may be more appropriate in today's Internet. Bulk forwarding of unfiltered e-mail is probably not a good idea. If systems are going to forward e-mail, it may be a good idea to use spam filters BEFORE forwarding the messages and use a distinct forwarding IP connections for those messages so the receiver can treat those messages as pre-filtered and direct complaints about those messages to the forwarder for handling. There are several other mailing lists covering the topics of e-mail, e-mail forwarding, spam technologies, etc.
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