Antispam - empowering employees

[Alvin Oga]

hi chuck

On Tue, 15 Jul 2003, Chuck Yerkes wrote:

> I'll try to respond in complete sentences and make presumptions
> on meaning where you don't bother with pronouns, verbs and what not.

Thanx for the reminder, and i think "the" is missing the above
sentence ?  and the sentence ends with "not" ... humm ...
( it's entertaining )

> You act like there's a clear delineation of spam/not-spam.

yes, that is my assumption, it either is spam or is not

and yes, some people think a specific email is spam while
another user does not.

but, if one of the users did not ask or want that email,
it is spam, even if its required/daily email for the other user

Everybody's "what is a spam" is different

I'm mere;y stating that for the most part,
	- most all spams come from foreign addresses
	- most all spams come from non-existent senders accounts
	- most all spams come from mail servers withour reverse dns
	- most all spams come from automated spam-ware
	- some spams try to address non-existent recipients
	- shall i go on ... and on ... ??
		- the company should already have a email/spam policy

	- all of the above can be filtered in a few minutes
	and never hits the users  and is not even stored in the mta
	nor forwarded for local delivery

	- spams should be bounced back to the sender, not filtered
	after you have received it in /var/spool/mail

	- most all spams generate/create additional loss of productivity
	than otherwise if that email didn't arrive at all
	( obviously mailing list content/replies are different
	( and even funnier if one subscribes and than blocks it 
	( w/ their spamfilters

> but some people don't want their Costco newletter tagged
> and quarantined.

people get it because they are members and it shouldnt
be going to anybody else

>  We can mutter "not work related mail" on those
> news letters, but from Staples or from  airlines, it often IS work
> related mail.

yup... if said activity is part of work
 
> So block at a high, certain threshold.  Tag at a lower threshold.
> And quarantine at a certain level.

that threshold is what the problem is ... a random number

that is why you dont know if something is spam or not based
on a random number ...
 
> Some of my users get offended at ANY swear words in their mail and
> expect that to be filtered.  Other users regularly swear at each
> other in mail (sales guys, lawyers ... "What is this *#&$ that you
> put in this last contract?....").  When my users are all the same,
> I can set the controls to be there same.  That's not my world.

professionalism or lack of ?? or just fed up with it and revert
back to "normal self"

> User controls are ESSENTIAL to 
> 1) let users make decisions on their thresholds of tolerance.

after it gets pass the global corp spam filter

> 2) alleviate having to hire lots of people to review several hundred
>    thousand quarantined messages each month

there should be ZERO quaranteed messages

> 3) give users a sense that they have some control of their mail

their job is to do work .. not figure out how to configure
their spam filters  differently than the other 100 or 1000 users
 
> If you treat your users like fools, you can find yourself without users.

i'd be purrfectly happy baby sitting machines ...
and you all probably agree to keep users away from me .. :-)
and i rather NOT deal with 100 or 1000 requests of the same issues
already fixed by a previous request/bug report
 
> server, even if they get Unix up, targetted at sites with < 5000 users.
> That's fewer that 2% of the businesses out there.

does that mean the 98% of business have more than 5,000 users ??
or that 2% of the business have more than 5,000 users ...

i hate double/triple negatives :-)
 
> So if you want to distance yourself from your users, 

yes definitely... yes .. yes ... no users for me to be nice
and polite to and worry about grammer and hurting someone's feelings

> if you WANT
> your users to feel helpless and business 

that is precisely why i dont want to deal with users ...
jump to tooo many extreme conclusions

> to feel that "with this
> solution, it depends on our consultant" then keep it up.

and more importantly... it depends on corporate policy

> However, the products in the rapidly growing anti-spam arena
> belie this trend.

it's a mine field..
 
> Me? I look for tool that make my users more powerful.

me ... sendmail w/ basic spam rules gets rid of 99.9% of the spam
and have false positives .. and nothing (spam-on-hold)for me to
go look at more than one


> When I can empower my users, but at the same time manage the mail
> and manage THEIR configurations (don't ever let them turn off
> anti-virus scanning, but let them run their own whitelists and
> turn up thresholds for things that THEY deem spam for them.

there are those that want to have that control ... good ...
and for those that want it handled by corporate "tech supp" ...

you need both ...

> Yup, and I say that I don't hire people because they can type email,
> I hire them becuase they have skills that my company needs.  Email
> is an important tool for many of these people to work effectively
> and keep my company competitive.  My talents in adapting email systems
> to do what my users needed have meant that my company has won 8 figure
> deals by being faster and better than our competition was.

good .. that's "productivity"
 
> > and if they say, they didnt get an important email from tom at some
> > customer site.. then what broke ??? 
> 
> Hey!  It's logged.

that fact that the email was lost or put on hold for review
is unacceptable to me ... 

> I got these calls ALL THE TIME even before filtering.  "I sent something
> to foo, they didn't get it.  Why not?"  We'd spend several hours

too much lost productivity in my book

> per week (around 0.3FTE) chasing these down. Inevitably, we traced it
> all the way though our system and out or all the way into proprietary
> mail system.
> 
> Best tool?  

no such thing ??

> Something that throws logs into a database and web i'face
> that lets users seek mail to/from them and lets non-unix mail admins
> seek data without calling me.
> Empower the users.

yup  ... if they have the skillset to do that task ...
or willing to learn .. ( even if its spam filters and virus filters )
but don't slip schedules 

> > 	- i prefer the it works for all or fails for all approach instead
> > 	of tweaking for each user
> 
> Gee, and isn't this system admin 101?

you will always 99.99% of the time have things tweeked for
each user ... no matter what the corp rules says
 	- keeping the time available to handle 50,100,200 users
	on a daily basis takes you from sys admin 101 to sys admin 
	"easy as pie", how would you like it today ?

> > lots of various email policy ... for corporations to implement
> 
> I'd rather not give people green screens and VMail.  I want my

hummm ...  corp email policy better not give any green screens
or missing/lost emails

> I'll embrace giving my users tools to make their work more productive
> and keeping mail they don't want out of their face.

yup.. thus the trick question .. "what email should be kept away"
and which emails can  be lost or put on hold till 
somebody gets a round tuit
	- lost or delayed emails is not acceptable to me

c ya
alvin