On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 11:28 PM, Barry Shein <bzs@world.std.com> wrote:
I realize this is easier in theory than practice but I wonder how much better the whole AOL (et al) spam button would get if they ignored the spam button unless two (to pick a number) different customers clicked the same sender (I know, forged sender etc but something like that) as spam in a reasonably short amount of time like an hour or a day at most.
.. and you think AOL doesnt track these? Come on, barry - try to give large mailops shops with massive userbases some credit for clue level. You have all the clue in the world but you dont even begin to guess at the firehose AOL / Yahoo / we etc have to deal with. Or what we routinely do, as a matter of best practice. I wont claim perfection, infallibility etc for any of the big 3 (hotmail / yahoo / aol) or even for us (large enough - 76 million users we filter for, 40 million of which we host). But a user report based spam reporting system works quite well on the aggregate. And yes, legitimate outfits can wind up blocked (universities because of unfiltered machines on campus, and because of nigerians / phishers hacking user accounts, webhosts because of hacked scripts, or because they end up hosting a high volume spammer in part of a /24 with legit customers near him ..) One thing that may need to be improved at one place or the other is false positive handling - make that faster and more efficient, and also publish the "unblock contact path" in block messages you issue, and you would find a lot of the gripes getting resolved. To some extent anyway. Postmaster work is a place for people with decent mailops / routing skills, yes - but far more than that, it is for people with both soft skills for customer service plus a finely tuned b.s detector. It is complex, and far too long for nanog .. took maawg three or four brainstorming sessions over a year to discuss. http://www.maawg.org/about/publishedDocuments/Abuse_Desk_Common_Practices.pd... And then some others relevant to this thread - http://www.maawg.org/about/publishedDocuments/MAAWG_Email_Forwarding_BP.pdf http://www.maawg.org/port25 http://www.maawg.org/about/publishedDocuments/MAAWG_AWPG_Anti_Phishing_Best_... http://www.maawg.org/about/publishedDocuments --srs