On 2012-09-21, Mikkel Bang <facebookman...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> What are these more intelligent, less crude techniques you talk about?
* content analysis (high quality but computationally costly)
* greylisting
crude and sloppy cost-cutting approaches:
* dnsbl
* reject_non_fqdn_helo_hostname
The crude and sloppy approaches are used by:
1) corporations maximizing profits. Their market consists of naive
users who have no idea how poor the server quality is -- iow,
there is virtually no market demand for quality; price is
everything. And apart from costs, it's also a means for large
players to monopolize, and control small players in an
anti-competitive fashion.
2) individual hot-heads on the frill, hostily driven by spam with an
evangelical mission to block every piece of spam with reckless
disregard for availability (loss of ham), and ultimately neglect
EFF principles on ethical mail handling.
If you are not in either of those groups, and you can afford a quality
server, then you have enough storage space to deliver every single
message without exception, both ham and spam. Of course, you deliver
the ham and spam to sensible locations, so the user has effective and
meaningful separation, and transparency to be able to validate the
filters, and adjust, without risking loss of legitimate messages.
Any fool can block spam. Skilled admins are the ones who create a
system that accepts every single legitimate message in a non-lossy
manner, and separate it.
It's all about the legitimate mail. The whole reason to run a mail
server is for legitimate mail. Spam causes damage to legitimate
traffic - but nothing damages legitimate traffic more than the
over-zealous (or simply naive) anti-spammer. The collateral damage is
actually the single biggest threat to legit mail -- bigger than spam
traffic itself.
