OT: Spam

[Bill Campbell]

On Thu, Jan 13, 2011, Fairlight wrote:
>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.

We never check root's mail folder because it's aliased to
an account that gets read, usually our support address here.

All the servers we set up accept *ALL* mail for postmaster,
security, and abuse plus tagged addresses we give out to vendors
and others where we really want to see their mail.  These
messages generally go into mail folders that do no spam checking.

The vast majority of messages that end up in my postmaster folder
is spam which then gets fed into spamassassin's sa-learn as
fodder for the Bayesian filters.

I do find it amusing that spammers, phishers, et al send their
trash to role accounts dedicated to nuking them.

Bill
-- 
INTERNET:   bill at celestial.com  Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC
URL: http://www.celestial.com/  PO Box 820; 6641 E. Mercer Way
Voice:          (206) 236-1676  Mercer Island, WA 98040-0820
Fax:            (206) 232-9186  Skype: jwccsllc (206) 855-5792

Force always attracts men of low morality.  -- Albert Einstein