On Tuesday 07 Feb 2006 22:08, Florian Weimer wrote:
As far as I can tell, the filters at AOL are far less problematic than crude filters at smaller sites which simply use SORBS or bl.spamcop.net.
Not here, no one cares if some small bit player has stupid filters, but when a significant volume of your email goes somewhere stupid filters hurt, queues build, users complain, and we are a bit player in the email world. We have a regular email to a customer rejected weekly by AOL because it contains a "banned URL". Wouldn't be so bad, but it contains web referer stats, so is nothing but URLs. We've no idea which URL it is, and I'm not doing a binary filter approach to work around their broken filters. Simplistic content only based rejection of email is just a broken model, as is using end-user input in too simplistic a fashion (end users make too many mistakes), AOL do both. I manage to filter all my personal email with no content inspection over and above "no Windows executable attachments here - thank you", no end user interaction, no silly places where falsely classified email stagnates, it really isn't difficult to deploy filters like this. But I thought the whole thing looked like a marketing campaign for Goodmail, and nothing more.