John Tice wrote:
I am always amazed to hear how much gets through on corporate systems.
My wife works in a corporate office with a dedicated IT department and
she says 60-70% of their total received is spam. I would think that
number to be intolerable. For instance, I have a VPS and host about a
dozen sites for small companies and non-profits and I am able to keep
the received percentage below 10% using only spamassassin (catching
99+ percent). On three personal accounts (well known to spammers) I
get a couple thousand spams per week. In the past week I've had two
spams get through and one false positive. And the FP almost doesn't
count because was borderline spammy and had a forged rcvd. I guess if
you must have zero FP for a diverse group then you naturally have to
give vermin a lot latitude, but I'd be cracking on the IT department
pretty hard.
The biggest problem is that if I really turn the screws on what would
hit spam, but not ham - I end up hammering a lot of people that deal
with the US government and shipping in general.
Customs brokers, freight forwarders, shipping lines, and similar all
have to deal with US Customs. The emails that fly back and forth (and
there can be thousands of them, just as notifications for tracking) are
almost all CAPS LOCK ON. The people haven't figured out that all caps is
harder to read than lower case.
I've just recently managed to make a lot of them straight ASCII text,
rather than html mail, and getting them to break loose from Outlook
composed 'Word Mail' was a pain.
I also don't have quite enough time (or get paid specifically for it) to
spend three to six days a month doing nothing but adjusting spam filters
for 30+ machines. What I do is enough for most of my customers,
especially since I do it more as an adjunct to my main service business
- I don't make money off of hosting.
BW
