Phil Howard put forth on 6/1/2010 11:25 AM:
On Tue, Jun 1, 2010 at 12:17, Stan Hoeppner <stan@hardwarefreak.com> wrote:
Phil Howard put forth on 6/1/2010 9:15 AM:
On Tue, Jun 1, 2010 at 10:04, Jerry <dovecot.user@seibercom.net> wrote:
The fight against SPAM is NOT Dovecots responsibility.
Whose responsibility is it to get detected spam delivered into the correct folder? Dovecot deliver is typically used to deliver into the Inbox(es). It would be involved.
It's the MTA's responsibility to _REJECT_ spam attempts at SMTP time. It's the mail OP's responsibility to properly configure the MTA to do so. Spam fighting should be performed pre queue, not post queue.
I suggest you bone up on modern spam fighting techniques. Post queue content analysis is not the proper way to fight spam, especially in 2010.
For my own personal server, I would agree. Even for a general email or freemail service I would agree.
However, for certain business environments, even a few false positives can be very troubling to management. Greylisting, and with shades of grey, is often more appropriate. Given that this puts mail where it will likely never be read or responded to, certainly doing as much as you can at SMTP time for a 5XX rejects is preferred, so that legitimate mail that would otherwise not be responded to is known to be not delivered where it would be read. But this can't be for everything, as even a FP rate of 0.01% is too much.
So in the end, there has to be an administrative policy decision as to what to do with what is detected as spam. And if I can find a way, I'd like to even set that up so end USER policy can be applied even at SMTP time (e.g. user decides if spam is blacklisted or greylisted, along with user specified whitelists). But that's pushing the boundaries for now. When I get time, I will look into that degree of control.
Law firm or heavily FED GOV regulated industry? Or just HUA (head up ass) management with zero understanding of email and spam?
-- Stan