OT: Spam

[Fairlight]

Simon--er, no...it was Mike Schwartz--said:
>      Reminds me of a machine shop a few years ago.  They didn't have an IT
> staff, but they thought they could setup their own MS Exchange server.  They
> thought it was working great, because it seemed to be eliminating a lot of
> spam.  However, nobody was looking at the spam folder, and a lot of
> essential emails like engineering changes on the machines they were building
> were getting shuffled into the spam folder and then getting deleted.  They
> had to pick up the tab for over $300,000.00 worth of missed spec changes...

Oops!

Yeah a lot of places don't bother checking root's mail folder--or even
bother aliasing addresses that are (by specification) mandated to be
deliverable.  Notably, postmaster should always be deliverable.  I know a
place that had failing Edge backups for months, and they never saw it
because the monitor for the console was broken, and they never checked
root's email.  Big problem when the tape drive died.

And Exchange servers are really only suggested as one server per 500 users.
Or used to be.  Bill Vermillion used to bring up this recommendation
periodically, and we would get a good chuckle out of it, as we had -real-
servers doing many times that, plus other work.

Exchange is to MTAs as IIS is to web servers--don't do it unless you have
no other choice.

mark->
-- 
Audio panton, cogito singularis.