(Please keep this on-list, no need to CC me. Reply-to and M-F-T set
accordingly.)
Jesse Stroik wrote:
I wasn't clear. I'm suggesting the user delete them.
I'm getting the impression you haven't spent much time in an ISP
helpdesk role.
A *lot* of the complainers are on dialup. Telling them to "just delete
the spam" is, um, not terrifically useful. Telling them to log in to
webmail to delete the spam before using their desktop mail client is
only marginally better.
Overaggressive
spam filters that get false positives are much more dangerous to email
than spam.
Granted... but try explaining to an 80-year-old grandmother who has
trouble with simply using the computer why this *nasty* email is coming
in to her inbox in the first place though.
Now that isn't right. I expect >90%. There is a big difference between
getting 95% with the last 5% being exponentially more difficult to catch
and only getting ~50%.
Yep. I suspect the 5% misses I'm seeing on my own account make up the
50%+ misses on other accounts - because those other accounts don't get
nearly as much spam as I do. (5-10 missed spams daily on my own account
is par for the course... 5-10 missed spams on some accounts makes up
that 50% miss rate.)
Which doesn't change the fact that I'm looking for suggestions on how to
improve the automated bits to bring that 5-10 down to say 2-3.
Customers will **sometimes** reduce the volume of their complaints when
you tell them "well, you may be getting 5 spams a day in your inbox, but
there are 300/day in your spam folder". However, it's more usually the
missed-spam:legit mail ratio that determines the loudness.
I'd recommend setting up a reporting account.
That's the easy part.
One man's definition of
spam may be another man's ziff-davis opt-in email, something your spam
filters shouldn't be automatically discarding.
Getting customers to forward missed spam properly is another story.
Been there, wore out several T-shirts. (Getting your ticket system to
not irretrievably mangle the forwards is a headache I haven't solved yet
- aside from setting up another account that doesn't dump into the
ticket system in the first place.)
And then you run into a customer with Outlook or Eudora... I have on
occasion managed to get a useful forward-as-attachment from Outlook.
Most are near-useless (AKA "headerless", as well as having had the body
reformatted and in one case I just had recently, the MIME boundary got
changed)... and Eudora is even worse.
-kgd
