On 07/01/2014 04:31 PM, Martin Gregorie wrote:
I know what can happen, and also that those complaints can arise from a total misunderstanding of what e-mail is designed to do: that it is *not* an instant messaging medium but it is a reliable one despite delivering over sometimes flaky networks. IOW demanding instant e-mail delivery is quite unreasonable.
I disagree. Email is what it is. If the sender and the receiver both agree that they should be able to expect messages between them to arrive in a short time, then that is the implied personal contract.
The real issue, here, is that we're applying a technological kluge to try to combat the social problem of massive abuse of the email system. If the goal of spammers is to wreck the (admittedly rather naive) email system, they've won. Of course, that was never their goal. But they've still wrecked email. And we admins trying to stop spam are also damaging the email system. We just hope we're doing more good than harm.
In short... try to explain that email isn't an instant messaging system to a customer with a dead fryer at 11AM emailing for a tech to help before the lunch crowd arrives. That's how email is used in the real world. And no amount of our saying "you shouldn't do that" is going to change the fact.
People do expect all sorts of things that email was never designed to handle. Protection for abuse by spammers is one. The sending of DVD attachments is another. And our own abuse of the system to try to prevent others' abuse of the system results in a certain collateral damage which is quite real.
I think that specific whitelisting could help here
It can help. But I cannot think of a whitelisting system, in tandem with a kluge like greylisting, which would not do more harm than good. At least not for a service organization like ours.
That said. I have plenty of kluges in place myself. I'm far from being authorized to speak from a "holier than thou" position. ;-)
-Steve
