Hi,
I don't agree. If antispam systems were really 100% sure to never have any false positive, I would agree (having false negative is less an issue). But we all know that such system does not exist yet (and probably never will IMHO, even though efficiency may increase to close to 100%, as it is still humans behind emails, we will never be able to trust fully a machine to class them). For such reason, I cannot do such a thing as blocking spams for users (I could tag them, but not block them) without giving possibility to check the blocked email. As it is an alias, then it is more difficult to manage (you can provide such system to local users, but when someone makes a redirection from one of his emails to another, this is usually to deal all of one's emails with the finale account). I don't think any email provider does "just block" spams.
For what happened here, the issue was that I have had an issue of the emails for aliases which were blocked in my spool for days. Then I managed to deblock them, but they have been all sent on the row (so this looked suspicious by the gmail server, which is normal). And as for many accounts, they receive a lot of spam (I receive a hundred everyday myself because of the age of my address). On normal use, they are simply received slowly during the day.
That's unfortunate, but I cannot do what you say for these reasons. This is somehow a question of network neutrality ( http://dig.csail.mit.edu/breadcrumbs/node/144 ). But don't make me tell what I don't: I would love to be able to block spam and if a secure antispam system appears, then I would use it. I don't argue that spam is potentially interesting and that we should allow it for people loving it (who?!) of course; the neutrality is only lost when the antispam fails and caught non-spam as well, because it is then a regulation system which controls people's personal data and would improve net experience of many at the price of data loss for others.
As a conclusion: email hosting is not my business, I am a developper, not an admin, and this server is only for my personal use and of a few friends... (you guess I wouldn't have such issue if it was a professional server). So there will never be tons of spam redirected to other servers (and only one guy in my server has such a redirection anyway, moreover my smtp servers is not accepting email relaying from unknown users). Regards,
Jehan
On Thu, Feb 5, 2009 at 12:47 PM, Charles Marcus <CMarcus@media-brokers.com>wrote:
On 2/5/2009, Jehan Pagès (jehan.marmottard@gmail.com) wrote:
and as there were many spams unfortunately in these emails forwarded (and it's not my server's purpose to remove the spams when forwarding), all requeued and sent in the following minutes, I saw in my logs that gmail has temporarily blocked my server with a human readable message from Google in my logs. Bye.
You should make it your servers business to do just that, otherwise you risk getting blocked (like you said you just did), when your server blindly forwards a ton of spam to other servers that DO care.
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Best regards,
Charles