[Nottingham] Tux Games Antispam - Your message is being held

[Michael Simms]

Hrm, not quite sure how that happened, as my spam system checks for all
addresses to see if any of them are valid, and anything tot he lug is
whitelisted as valid. Unless someone CC/BCC'd the list, which would
cause this...

Oh well. Thats life.

On Sun, 2007-12-09 at 18:21 +0000, Simon Osborne wrote:
> On 09/12/2007, Chris Burton <Chris at 7of9b.org> wrote:
> > Yum yum..
> >
> > Another sample to add to my Challenge Response ClamAV signature file :)
> > Why do people think C/R solves their problem without thinking about the poor
> > recipients of the spam it creates.

Actually I did think about it. I decided if someone was sending an email
to me, they could spend 20 seconds longer, or why should I bother
reading it. I also spent days making as sure as I possibly could that it
wouldn't do what it has done, and when anyone writes a bugfree piece of
software they can come tell me about it.

> > ChrisB.
> 
> Oh no, we'll end up with a big long argument about challenge response
> again like we did some time ago when this last happened!

Yeah, its coming so I thought I may as well put in my 2p before everyone
jumped on the how evil C/R is. Personally, Ive spent a lot of time
making sure it doesnt mess up, and this is the first time in 3 years it
has done. The challenge/response system I have written for my company
has blocked over a million spam emails, and to handle those would have
cost me a fulltime (or at the least a parttime) extra staffmember for
the last 4 years, costing me tens of thousands of pounds. And for the
minor 20 second inconvenience - and one bug in 3 years, I am not
planning to apologise. Blame it on the spammers, not the people trying
to keep their mailbox usable.

And yes yes yes I know I could use some sort of spamassassin system -
hello, I run a BUSINESS - I can NOT afford to EVER have false positives.
A customer that cannot contact my customer service email address because
they live in scunthorpe, or other such thing, is way way way less
acceptable than a few bad challenges, or them being perfectly able to
contact us after 20 seconds extra effort.

Yes, I have tried to work on a system where it challenge-responses after
spamassassin-ing the email first, so that it allows through anything
that passes a strict spamassassin rule, and then as a secondary line
goes through the c/r system. Wasnt as easy as it looked, though maybe
I'll get it working one day.

> Simon
> 
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> Nottingham at mailman.lug.org.uk
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-- 
Michael Simms, CEO - Tux Games
http://www.tuxgames.com