On Mon, 26 Sep 2005, Suresh Ramasubramanian wrote:
regular email forwarding IF you filter first
And if the customer specifically requests that YOU do not filter his email, or set up a system that allows him to see ALL email, even if ti is tagged as spam? Personally, I feel that at some point, filtering email becomes a violation of the provider's obligation to provide the customer a service. Spam filtering should be opt-in only by the customer, and not forced on the customer with no way to opt out. If your customer depends on his email for business, and your automated system rejects a valid email due to a false positive, the results can have a devistating effect on your customer's business. Now, I have heard the arguements, such as a customer should not use a private account to conduct business, or business should not be conducted through email, or that allow spam in forces a hardship on the service provider, and they may all be very true, but it does not change the truth that a single false positive can ruin a business. I tried many different ways to filter spam, and honestly, I could find no system that did not create false positives, so I removed all server-based spam measures from my servers that are not strictly opt-in, and allows the customers to review all messages not immediately released into their inbox. This is probably not practical for a company like Bell South, or AOL, or anyone that has millions of email customers, but works for me. -Sean