Hi All,
Just lost another one, dammit. Small company with about 6 mailboxes
who some consultant gave them a song and dance about how Gmail's such a
better mail service since "they don't get any spam"
No it's not going to break us.
But this is what I see happening.
SpamAssassin for us filters probably about 80% of the spam out of the
box, doing nothing other than using defaults.
If the users feed the learner, it's even better. But, the spam is
coming in at such a tremendously high volume now that when a user
account gets 5,000 pieces of mail a day, all of it except for maybe
5 pieces of mail are NOT spam, even at 99% effectiveness, the user is
STILL getting 50 pieces of spam in a day that SpamAssassin misses,
compared to their 5 pieces of ham mail.
they don't see the 4,950 pieces of mail we deleted for them. They
just see the 50 pieces that got past, compared to their 5 legitimate
pieces.
So naturally the users figure we are rat bastards who aren't doing a
good job filtering. So they setup a test account at Google and "try it
out for a month"
Of course, the account gets very little spam. Why would it otherwise?
It's brand new. It hasn't had a chance to be disseminated to all of the
mailing lists, the websites, the other coorespondents's computers of
theirs that get hit by harvesting viruses.
Their ignorance then reinforces their invalid perception and then they
figure we are liars. So they move their domain.
A year later, when Gmail is doing the same thing to them, they finally
figure out it's not the provider, its the spammers and oh boy maybe
we weren't lying after all. But, it's a lot of work to shift back to
us, so why bother if all the mail services are the same way?
So they are gone, permanently, never to return.
We have tried educating them. But spamfighting today is complex. If
you explain it completely and they understand the explanation and
believe you, they give up hope because they realize that just hitting
the delete button on those 50 pieces of spam is easier than shifting
their poor email behaviors that got them into the mess in the first
place. But then a month later the complex explanation is forgotten
and they are once more vulnerable to any snake oil sales consultant
selling them gmail. But most of them don't understand anyway.
And if you just try to dumb down the explanation it starts making no
sense at all very quickly.
What do other people do? Or are we just going to end up with an
Internet in about 10 years where every single email box is either on
Microsoft 365 or Gmail and the NSA has a wonderful interface to use to
hunt through whatever they want without bothering with a warrant?
And to add insult to injury - this small company is a dental office -
subject to HIPAA - and Gmail is not (and has stated they will not) be
HIPAA complaint. We are!
Ted
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