On Thu, Apr 18, 2019 at 11:48:29PM +0100, Chris Woods wrote: > I operate web services and mail servers for a small number of commercial > clients, and the opaque (and seemingly erratic) classification criteria for > emails is causing me sleepless nights at the moment.
[ My comments are generic. They're in a thread about outlook.com but they are intended much more widely. ---rsk ] That's because it's a worst practice in mail systems engineering -- an anti-pattern, if you will. It is, as you describe, opaque and erratic, and this in turn creates a cascade of problems for everyone: senders, recipients, mail system operators. Best practice is to accept/reject messages only. No classification, no quarantining, no "spam folders", none of that. This provides transparency to everyone: mail system operators on both sides can see exactly what happened and (provided the rejection message is sensible) why and (provided RFC 2142 role addresses exist and are properly monitored/dealt with in a timely manner) seek resolution of the issue. It also provides transparency to users and avoids all of the wasted time and energy that goes into "I didn't get it" "But I sent it" "Well I didn't get it, send it again" "I sent it again" "I still didn't get it" and the myriad variations on that theme. Of course mistakes will be made in doing so: mistakes are *already* being made. The problem now is that those mistakes are being made in the dark where nobody can see them, thus nobody can ascertain what they are, diagnose them, and fix them. Those mistakes need to be made in the open so that everyone can see them -- and so that their visibility renders them amendable to diagnosis and solution. A review of traffic on this mailing list (as well as others) with this in mind will reveal that a lot of the issues raised are being raised because of this worst practice. An enormous amount of time and energy has been expended by mail system operators attempting to compensate for this *even though they're not the ones doing it*. And that likely pales into insignificance compared to the aggregate sender/recipient time spent trying to detect, diagnose, and work around issues that they likely don't understand. Some of us knew that doing anything other than accept/reject was a very bad idea many years ago. Everyone should know it now. It has become obvious on inspection by even the casual observer. ---rsk _______________________________________________ mailop mailing list mailop@mailop.org https://chilli.nosignal.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mailop
