On 27-Dec-22 20:55, Olivier MJ Crépin-Leblond wrote:
On 26/12/2022 22:11, John Levine wrote:
With all due respect, you have no clue what it's like to run a large
mail system. I only have some idea from talking to people who do.
While I am no happier than anyone else about filtering mistakes, or
the stream of spam from Gmail accounts that shows up in my inbox every
morning, it is not like they could snap their fingers and fix it. The
large mail systems have dedicated spammers who only attack specific
systems with specific attacks using hacks like targeted BGP injection
so that the traffic is invisible to everyone else.
You're right, I don't personally run a large system, but I do run small and consult for medium systems, a great many of which are getting replaced now by going off to gmail & outlook. I understand the challenges are significant but I also deplore the decision to move to gmail & outlook for, UK universities for example, who had a computer systems department in the past but now have subcontracted it to an outside contractor, who has in its turn subcontracted the email system to gmail or outlook for purely commercial reasons (and it's less headache). Email was one of the last means of communication that was not vendor-specific and this is changing.
The outsourcing mania is not confined to UK universities. I don't think
the problem has much to do with "free" providers. Office365 is not in any
way a free service. I don't know which outsourcer is ultimately responsible
for Tom Petch's issues, or if the issue with involuntary users of email
outsourced to Office365 is general, but I've recently had very surprising
"550 Envelope blocked" rejects when sending from Gmail to such a user.
Gmail is a free service and we users know that makes us part of the
product, but its spam and bogon detection is civilised and trainable.
So far, it has been very rare for it to filter IETF list mail. It does
trap on the order of incoming 100 spams/day, but I don't see more than
~1 false positive per week.
Brian
