On Fri, Aug 24, 2007 at 11:54:38AM -0400, Jorey Bump wrote: > In my opinion, no amount of backscatter is acceptable, so I don't allow > user-configurable autoresponders or forwarding. My antispam measures > have reduced the amount that makes it to the user's inbox to about > 5/week, so I will make a rare exception, but only if I configure it > myself. 5/week? Whee. We might achieve something remotely approaching that with personalized bayesian filtering (a multi-discipline, internationaly connected university receives quite a lot of ham that looks very much like spam, so we are a bit paranoid about false positives). > Forwarding has proven to be more risky than autoresponses, > because agressive ESPs can create a temporary DoS to their sites for the > entire server. This is particularly frustrating when the cause is your > own user marking a forwarded message as spam. > > On systems that I use but don't manage, autoresponders and forwarding do > cause problems, and servers get publicly blacklisted regularly. There is > also an increase in volume caused by the backscatter from autoresponses, > affecting both bandwidth and storage needs. > > That said, both features can be useful and even justifiable, but have > fallen into disfavor due to the problems they cause. RFC 3834 compliance > and continual evaluation of your antispam measures will help. > Unfortunately, demand for these features often has a political component > that can affect you professionally, so only you can decide what's best. I'm trying to battle the political component. ;) I don't have much to fear, though, since this appears to be one professor against the IT department, university board, and so on. That is: my boss understands that this is a trade-off between a useful feature and a risk of getting blacklisted... ;) Thanks for your insight again. --Janne -- Janne Peltonen <janne.peltonen@xxxxxxxxxxx> ---- Cyrus Home Page: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/ Cyrus Wiki/FAQ: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/twiki List Archives/Info: http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/mailing-list.html
