FocusCanada Forums

<RANT>
Ok, they put a new spam filter in at work here (I work for an ISP).

Unforunately, its doing its job TOO well. This is "working as intended" though. It's automatically filtering everything into the spam folder, which customers can access through our website, using the web-based email. Most of them use outlook express or incredimail or some such.. so now they have to learn something else.

What we're told to have the customer do, is to go into that spam folder, and mark the emails they want to keep, so that they don't get snatched up again. NOW, these people are on dialup, so speed is definately a problem. Especially the ones who live in the sticks and get lousy connection speeds. Some have 2000+ spam messages in the folder, plus the ones they should be getting. They're also not technially saavy to even try to deal with this. Most of our customers are older folks and don't understand a lot of this stuff. They just want their email from their kids, and call it a day. Not have to do this sort of housekeeping on a regular basis.

Again, this is working as intended. Does this seem normal to anyone?

We've complained up and down that it needs to be fixed, or make it less restrictive. Its fallen on deaf ears since this whole mess started, over a week ago. Hell, the emails we send out from support get filtered. Including a nice little email they have us send out with instructions on how to "train" the filter not to eat their mail.

Which means after they've initially gone through all of this disaster, they'll STILL have to go back in there if they receive an email from someone new, from an online company, ebay, or whatever. I've done a few by hand for some people, and I'm seeing rather important emails getting filtered, such as cellular bills, credit card statements, car loan statements

And of course, 85% (wild guess) of these people are irate, and of course, I get to hear all about it. Including this morning at 7:05am. Not a big fan of getting chewed out first thing in the morning.

Damn did any of this make sense?
</RANT>

I work for an IT outsourcing company in a network operations center. I hear irate customers all the time.

Do what I do. Transfer the irate person to the sales manager/sales department/complaints department. Once they realize that they will lose business due to this, they usually change their minds quickly.

Hearing an internal tech bitch that their system sucks is one thing. Having a customer tell them their system sucks and they are going to pull their account is something completely different.

Ryan

sounds like a serious flaw in the spam management policies... someone wasn't thinking with their good thinking cap.

There should be global spam policies that allow for e-mails from trusted sources and whatnot.

I see this a lot with network topologies and programming practices. Someone built their best practices to take on the most paranoid stance instead of the sensible business need stance.

People that come up with these unsensible policies piss me off. Friggin' amateurs IMO.

We have the same issues here with the spam filter they installed when they upgraded the systems. I clearly explained to the CIO at a meeting before this system was installed that the proposed filters would not work as he claimed, pointing out by example perfectly legitimate e-mails that would likely get blocked.

CIO tells me in no uncertain terms that he's going ahead with the implementation, the expected happens and we lost 25% of our legitimate e-mail to the spam guard dog, there's no way to resolve it with the system as implemented and the CIO's response the irate phone calls of users? FOAD as the "Security of the network is more important" :rolleyes:

And the truly ironic part of this schmozzle? This vaunted email filter is an abject failure at catching spam that uses graphics as part of the message text, so I'm getting bombarded by stock tip spam daily. Which I dutifully forward to the Spam Complaints box provided, which in turn seems to go to the electronic bit bucket in the sky :angry: Hell my ISP does a better job filitering this crapola out :blink:

NefCanuck

I really got on a bender about an earlier spam product that we were considering (as in NO WAY) until we got NEMX SecurExchange. Good stuff. Totally cutomizeable whitelisting and blacklisting options (at the local server level), updateable heuristics and definitions, RBL... you name it.

It runs as a SMTP event sink and really doesn't add much memory working set bloat.

True anti-spam should mark and quarantine at best, not completely delete email. We, as a contractor, know this all too well when one person was charged with complete spam responsbility.

Now, we do it the only way I'm convinced you should... mark it as SPAM, send it on its way. This way, no important emails are EVER lost. Period.

NOS,

Sounds like you haev the product implemented that I would push for, but the big question is does it cost anything? The CIO is a firm believer in "open source" (IE: Free) because it make him look good when he isn't spending $ because the people above him never hear the complaints of the users when we're forced to use these products that don't work as promised <_<

NefCanuck

^--- there are open source spam filters that work just fine.

Also, might want to point out that the security of the network is just as compromised if graphic-based spam gets through.

I've seen a few that take advantage of holes in Microsoft's GDI interfaces... not to mention a few that take advantage now of holes in various graphics drivers...

of course my machine is pretty safe, but there's a few people out there with my work e-mail that aren't so lucky considering the spike in activity lately.

My ISP has the same thing, except... it relabels the titles to include '[SPAM]' in front of the title, so you have the option to filter what my ISP believes is spam, to a specific spam folder, much better idea in my eyes. So if your willing to sort the crap automatically/reconfigure safe mail, you have the choice.

NefCanuck,Oct 25 2006, 02:44 PM Wrote:NOS,

Sounds like you haev the product implemented that I would push for, but the big question is does it cost anything?  The CIO is a firm believer in "open source" (IE: Free) because it make him look good when he isn't spending $ because the people above him never hear the complaints of the users when we're forced to use these products that don't work as promised <_<

NefCanuck
[right][snapback]213348[/snapback][/right]

My renewal for this year (full filtering, friendly domains, etc) - $345 CDN. For over 200 mailboxes. :)

1-613-831-2010 - Ask for Cyndi Regular, their sales whiz. John Young is one of their main tech leads and support guys. They're both real easy to talk to. We're actually corporate references now for NEMX - I get the odd call, they ask about our config and usage of SecurExchange, etc.

Perhaps we'll see some nice golf shirts at Christmas or something :)

Given how reasonable the cost is on the software and how well it works... I'm more than happy to help promote a made-in-Canada spam solution.

Our current standard is "SPAM - " in front of the rest of the subject line. :D

In the past we used spam assassin, and it worked fine for the most part, occasionally throwing a legitimate spam into /dev/null. I'm not quite sure what they are using now.

I think the best bet is to add [SPAM] to the beginning, or at least spend a day, and add "friendly" domains. suchs as THIS ISP, ebay, paypal, amazon, aol (as much as i hate it), etc. Hell, there has to be a listing somewhere that has already been compiled they could get their cheap little hands on to import. Then give them somewhere to send the real spam emails to so that they also get blocked.

NOS2Go4Me,Oct 26 2006, 08:11 AM Wrote:

NefCanuck,Oct 25 2006, 02:44 PM Wrote:NOS,

Sounds like you haev the product implemented that I would push for, but the big question is does it cost anything?  The CIO is a firm believer in "open source" (IE: Free) because it make him look good when he isn't spending $ because the people above him never hear the complaints of the users when we're forced to use these products that don't work as promised <_<

NefCanuck
[right][snapback]213348[/snapback][/right]

My renewal for this year (full filtering, friendly domains, etc) - $345 CDN. For over 200 mailboxes. :)

1-613-831-2010 - Ask for Cyndi Regular, their sales whiz. John Young is one of their main tech leads and support guys. They're both real easy to talk to. We're actually corporate references now for NEMX - I get the odd call, they ask about our config and usage of SecurExchange, etc.

Perhaps we'll see some nice golf shirts at Christmas or something :)

Given how reasonable the cost is on the software and how well it works... I'm more than happy to help promote a made-in-Canada spam solution.

Our current standard is "SPAM - " in front of the rest of the subject line. :D
[right][snapback]213410[/snapback][/right]

Well, I'll certainly bring it up at the next meeting as I dump my personal pile of received spam for this quarter in front of him <_< Hrm, on the clinic side are approx 750 users, so that's still likely gonna be pretty reasonable.

I'm just getting so personally PO'd because of the extra hassles involved trying to get legitimate e-mails white listed, when you have to involve a "problem resolution officer" to do that, I blow my stack. Not to mention the complaints I hear from other users (Of course they never follow my suggestion and forward thier spam like I do, but that's another issue altogther :rolleyes: )

NefCanuck