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I am not convinced that blocking the first instance of an email until a
second arrives from the same source within four hours reflects the best
interests of doing business on campus.  It is trivial for a spammer to send
multiple emails from the same source within a four hour period but almost
impossible to get legitimate email sources to do the same thing.  I really
think that this practice should be thought through in conjunction with
administrative units on campus since it affects their operations in very
significant ways.  Quite frankly, now that I know how this spam filter
works, I don't see how I can justify using my MSU email address to do MSU
business and will need to migrate to some form of alternate.  Is there a way
of option out of this portion of the spam filter?

-----Original Message-----
From: Edward R Kryda [mailto:[log in to unmask]] 
Sent: Tuesday, October 23, 2007 10:20 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [MSUNAG] E-mail Issues

John Valenti writes: 

> 
> On October 23, at 5:18 PM October 23, Laurence Bates wrote: 
> 
>> In addition, I regularly have problems getting security codes for  
>> software that I purchase off the Internet and need to use immediately.
> 
> Laurence, this is probably from the greylisting... email from a new  
> sender is automatically rejected the first (few?) times, just to help  
> make sure it is a valid smtp server. 
> 
> I have noticed this issue too, but felt that it was a worthwhile  tradeoff

> to reject more spam using this method. 
> 
> As I recall, a second message from the same sender goes thru  immediately.

> So if there is some means of getting the remote end to  send any sort of 
> message to you first, the important message should  come thru right away.

> Maybe someone from the mail team could comment  on this?

After the second attempt at delivery, in under a 4 hour time period, the 
server is then trusted for approximately 36 days. (The process must be 
repeated afterwards) 

Unfortunately there are web apps which don't use an email server to send out

confirmations, etc from their pages. They attempt at sending only 1 message 
without worrying about delivery errors. 

Please submit a problem ticket with the ACNS Help Desk at 
http://help.msu.edu if you're having an issue like this. If possible we try 
to see if a sending host is able to be RFC complaint with retrying delivery.

If this fails and the server doesn't appear to be a potential large source 
of spam, then we can add its IP address to an exception list. 

>  
> 
>> I don't blame ACNS for the email delays since they are clearly  related 
>> to the SPAM spikes that we typically get just before Fall  and Spring 
>> breaks.
> 
> Not sure where you are getting the spam spikes related to breaks?  I  
> thought it was 24x7 problem, about 97% of messages are spam.

Yeah, Spammers unfortunately don't rest. We do see overall system spikes 
that correspond to the University academic schedule. (I'm sure many other 
services do as well) Today's performance issues aren't related to Spam, but 
due to our issues with performing backups. More information is posted at: 
http://servicestatus.list.msu.edu 

 -Ed


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