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MSUNAG  October 2007

MSUNAG October 2007

Subject:

Re: E-mail Issues

From:

"Surato, Michael S." <[log in to unmask]>

Reply-To:

Surato, Michael S.

Date:

Wed, 24 Oct 2007 14:27:15 -0400

Content-Type:

text/plain

Parts/Attachments:

Parts/Attachments

text/plain (126 lines)

What many people seem to forget is that e-mail is not an instantanous
form of communication. For this reason, one persons timeliness is
another persons extreamly late. The delay of an hour once every 36 days
is in many respects a fair price to pay for a overall more responsive
e-mail system. In my understanding, if the mail arrives within 1-3 days,
it is considered "on time" by the standard. What do you believe is
timely?

+-------------------------------------------+
|            Michael Surato                 |
|      College of Arts and Letters          |
|      Michigan State University            |
|            320 Linton Hall                |
|        East Lansing, MI 48824             |
| Voice: (517) 353-0778 Fax: (517) 355-0159 |
+-------------------------------------------+ 
 
-----Original Message-----
From: MSU Network Administrators Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
Behalf Of Laurence Bates
Sent: Wednesday, October 24, 2007 2:12 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [MSUNAG] E-mail Issues

Yes, but what do you tell upper level administrators when they find that
a major funding source is being jeopardized by untimely email
communications?
Relying on what you hear from people is convenient but not very
sensitive to their real concerns.

-----Original Message-----
From: Brian Martinez [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Wednesday, October 24, 2007 1:40 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [MSUNAG] E-mail Issues

All,

I would like to point to my original in-depth thread on the matter of
greylisting:

http://list.msu.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0704&L=MSUNAG&P=R995&I=-3

Furthermore, I would like to go even more in-depth and touch upon
several things to make sure we are all on the same page about this.  
There are going to be lots of numbers, so please read closely:

------
* A sender only needs to send 1 message, not 3 messages.
* A sender does not a receive a flat out rejection, merely a 451
Temporary Error.
* A sender not in our database has to go through the greylisting delay,
sender's who have passed the test should get through without exception
* With a properly configured SMTP server, most senders can get through
the greylisting process in well under one hour.
* Our SMTP daemons at mail.msu.edu are configured to respond to 451
Temporary Errors as such:  retry sending the message every five minutes
for fifteen minutes.  Failing that, retry the message every ten minutes
for one hour.  Failing that retry sending the message every two hours
for 16 hours, and so on...
* As I write this there are currently 1,109,396 hosts who we "trust"  
Naturally, some of them are spammers, but most of them are not.
* The above number grows every single day/hour/minute.
-----
The following should give you an idea of the exceptions we make.
These folks completely bypass the greylisting process:
* We maintain a list of exceptions for nearly all .gov addresses in the
United States (we generate it based off of our logs), currently at 4,242
listings
* We maintain a list of exceptions for every host here at MSU that
carries a valid MX record, currently at 341 listings
* We maintain a list of miscellaneous hosts of people who were privy
enough to go through our Help Desk and make sure their email goes
through as expected.  We have helped a few hosts reconfigure their mail
servers to meet the RFC spec., currently at 151 listings
* We auto-generate a list of larger domains who carry SPF records, AOL,
Google, Amazon, Hotmail, Microsoft and more recently Fidelity
Investments, currently at 129 listings
* The website greylisting.org provides a list of hosts who have
difficulty bypassing anybody's greylisting setup.  Including Southwest
Airlines, MoveOn.org, lists.mysql.com, and ameritradeinfo.com to name a
few.  This only has 22 entries.
------

You'll note from our stats page:  
http://project.mail.msu.edu/~rrdtool/spam.php   That we have easily 
dropped 600,000 pieces of spam PER DAY since we implemented
greylisting!!  Of course spam still does come through, and some
legitimate email does get dropped.  But with folks knowing that they are
expecting a piece of email and it hasn't come through, they know to hit
up our Help Desk and we work through to resolve the problem.

I have not heard a single complaint about greylisting until just
recently, so I hope this helps put things in perspective and helps clear
things up a bit.  As Nick noted earlier, greylisting is system-wide.  It
sits as a transparent-bridge between the Internet and mail.msu.edu.  The
vast majority of people sending to us (nearly 1,110,000 different hosts)
do not even know they have gone through greylisting.

If there is email _not_being received, the best method for finding out
is testing with outside sources first, such as Gmail/Yahoo/Hotmail/etc.

Then calling our Help Desk and providing them with full headers from the
successfully received message at whatever 3rd party address that was
used.  We will then investigate the issue and determine if its
greylisting or not, and if it is, we will see if it is possible to have
their mailer reconfigured properly.  If that is outside of the scope of
the person attempting to mail us, we will work to add them to our
exceptions list (which also seems to grow weekly as of late).  Of
course, if the issue is not greylisting, we will work to find the
appropriate area to move the issue into.

If people are so inclined, then anyone is obviously free to migrate
elsewhere.  I wanted to make sure as many facts as I could recall were
clear before anyone decides to go anywhere else.  It is a very
trustworthy system and the majority of people I hear from swear by it
and are quite happy it is in place.

Regards,
./brm


__________ NOD32 2614 (20071024) Information __________

This message was checked by NOD32 antivirus system.
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