[Sussex] I'm not receiving any emails from slug

[Steve Dobson]

Hi Alan

On Thu, 2008-11-20 at 01:35 +0000, 4alanj wrote:
> I'm not receiving any emails from SLUG? I've used another  computer
> but no luck.
>  
> Any suggestions (if I can receive them).

These days this is not a very active list.  This month there have only
been four e-mails recorded in the archives.   But if you're not
receiving even this small number then I would suggest you look to the
spam filtering by your mail hosting.

I looked up the MX (mail deleivery) records for 4email2000.fsnet.co.uk:

4email2000.fsnet.co.uk.	86400 IN MX 2 mail-in.freeserve.com.

This tells me that your email is handled first by one of FreeServe's
servers.  What happens to it after that I can't say.  I guess they are
now owned by Orange because when I surf to freeserve.com I get bounced
to Orange's website where there is very little information about what
they do Internet wise - most of the help information I saw in a few
moments I looked were about the mobile phone side of their business.

If your not getting emails from SLUG then I would suggest that the spam
filters employed are being too aggressive.  I would also like to suggest
that you first contact your ISP and find out if and how you can adjust
your own personal settings.  Can you add "sussex at mailman.lug.org.uk" to
a white list so messages from it don't get filtered out?

I suspect that many of the larger ISP, especially those that target the
general public (rather than us IT/Linux geeks), have configured their
spam filters to be very aggressive indeed.  If you get no joy with your
current ISP then you may wish to consider switching to one that is more
dedicated to providing Internet access and not one that where it is just
part of the package together with telecommunications, video
entertainment, early morning cups of tea in bed or whatever.  I use Zen
Internet, they are by no means the cheapest but they do provide an
excellent service.  Weather they would be right for you is, of course, a
completely different question.

I don't have a problem with getting e-mail from SLUG.  One of these
reasons is that I run my own e-mail server and therefore I get to select
the spam filtering software and polices.  It took me a while but I
finally got it configured so that it was filtering right and I don't
believe I lose many e-mails as false positive and there are very few
false negatives (< 10 per day).

I configured a similar set-up for one of my clients - filtering is done
using open relay blocking lists, SpamAssassin and greylisting - it
differs only in the that the final e-mail destination within his network
is a Microsoft Small Business 2003 server where some additional spam
filtering software, GFI, is running.  We configured the thing with a
feed back loop so that any e-mails that are identified by GFI as spam
are feed back into SpamAssassin so most of the filtering is done up
front by the Linux/exim4 e-mail server.

What is useful is we have been tracking figures on this system since we
started.  Looking at the data today for this email I notice that the
number of attempts at delivery is reduced from when we started.  I don't
know if that is caused by the spammers realising that his email address
is well filtered now and not targeting his email addresses as much or if
there has been a general drop in spam on the net.

To give you some idea of the effects you can get the system is getting
around 1000 e-mail per day of which around 150 are legitimate (this
figure includes the less than 20 false positives).  He's happy and so am
I that it is this effective.

Sorry to drift a bit off topic, but you never know, someone may find it
interesting.  For me spam and spam filtering have turned what was a very
reliable way to communicating into one that is much more hit or miss.  A
number of my friends don't get e-mails I send although my logs show that
the email was received by their ISP's email server.

Steve
> 
-- 
Steve Dobson

The best way to make a fire with two sticks is to make sure one of them
is a match.
-- Will Rogers

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