[Dovecot] help a journalist: What do you wish the CIO understood about fighting spam?
Hi, folks. I'm senior online editor at CIO.com, and I'm working on an article for which I'd very much like your help. There's often a lack of communication between techies and top company management. Maybe they don't want to hear about problems; perhaps you give them technical details that are far more granular than they want to know. But dealing with spam is a topic that every e-mail admin has to cope with -- and I'm not sure that the CIO knows the real issues. I have the ear of the boss, however. Essentially, I'm trying to put together the collected wisdom of e-mail and network admins in a fashion that CIOs will understand. Or at least one teeny corner of it. So I have a very simple question to pose to you: ***If you could get your CIO (or top management) to understand one thing, just ONE thing, about fighting spam, what would it be?*** And the follow-up: why did you pick that one item? Feel free to share anecdotes, horror stories, even success stories. While I hope that every CIO will read this article, I also hope that it becomes the document you bring to a new manager ("Here: this is what's important to me"). I'm sure there are plenty of other things that you wish your CIO grokked, whether about e-mail administration or other topics (not the least of which is "the e-mail admin is underpaid"). But I do have to limit myself somehow, and "what's important about fighting spam" has a lot of leeway. I'll be sure to stop by here (as I expect others want to participate in the conversation), but feel free to cc me with your response or send me a private message. I'm hoping for a rather fast turnaround on this article, so please blurt out your first thoughts rather than plan on writing a nice, leisurely response. If all goes well, I'd like to get this article posted in the next couple of weeks. Please be sure to let me know how to refer to you in the article; the usual format is &name, &title, &company and &location ("Esther Schindler is a senior developer at the Groovy Corporation in Scottsdale Arizona"). If you give me some kind of context I'm willing to work without one. That is, I do need some identifying characteristics to give the article credibility ("Esther works at a large finance company in the Southwest"). Esther Schindler senior online editor, CIO.com http://blogs.cio.com/blog/37
Well, for starters, Dovecot is an IMAP server and doesn't really get involved in the spam side of things at all.
You'd be better off directing your question to mailing lists such as the Exim, Postfix, Sendmail or even Courier one, which deal with MTA issues. However, you may find that your query will be treated as off-topic and spam :)
To answer your question, I'd be surprised if any CIO worth his/her salt wasn't aware of how difficult the spam situation is at the moment. It affects anyone with email directly. My only comment here would be that there is no magic technical bullet to deal with spam, although large-sample filtering seems to work OK.
-- Juha http://www.geekzone.co.nz/juha
Hi, Juha!
I'm posting a similar message on forums for those apps, too. But my
main intent is to get in touch with people who lie awake at night
dealing with e-mail issues. Yes, it's off topic, but nobody has a
"gosh I wish I could talk about general e-mail admin issues" list --
at least, I haven't found one yet.
As far as your assumption that CIOs are always aware of the
difficulty... you may not have met as many of them as I have. <grin>
While most do know that it's a big hairy deal, they may not realize
just how much of an admin's time is spent dealing with the problem,
or they may not be aware just how many end-users are naive enough to
sign up for web sites that promise "you might win gizmo" and then
proceed to send out a bunch of junk mail.
Esther
On Jan 9, 2007, at 3:34 PM, Juha Saarinen wrote:
Well, for starters, Dovecot is an IMAP server and doesn't really get involved in the spam side of things at all.
You'd be better off directing your question to mailing lists such as the Exim, Postfix, Sendmail or even Courier one, which deal with MTA issues. However, you may find that your query will be treated as off-topic and spam :)
To answer your question, I'd be surprised if any CIO worth his/her salt wasn't aware of how difficult the spam situation is at the moment. It affects anyone with email directly. My only comment here would be that there is no magic technical bullet to deal with spam, although large-sample filtering seems to work OK.
-- Juha http://www.geekzone.co.nz/juha
Esther Schindler wrote:
Hi, Juha!
I'm posting a similar message on forums for those apps, too. But my main intent is to get in touch with people who lie awake at night dealing with e-mail issues. Yes, it's off topic, but nobody has a "gosh I wish I could talk about general e-mail admin issues" list -- at least, I haven't found one yet.
The appropriate forum is the spam-l mailing list - http://www.claws-and-paws.com/spam-l/spam-l.html.
Regards
James Turnbull
-- James Turnbull james@lovedthanlost.net
Author of Pro Nagios 2.0 (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1590596099/)
Hardening Linux (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1590594444/)
PGP Key (http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x0C42DF40)
I sent Esther this about the need for feedback in mail software and standards.
I'll pass this on to more appropriate people but would like to bend your ear on a marginally related riff of my own.
The problem is NO FEEDBACK
People (understandably) want to use email without understanding it, its mechanism, its realities. Unfortunately, this puts the IT department in a world like that of the early 1900's when a world of horse riders was trying to use cars in the way they used horses. The result is users who regard email as a sort of problematic tool that might as well be magic. Not understanding it, they bang on it and misuse it in the most preposterous ways, like: = having a 500MB inbox under IMAP which they don't understand is a single file...and wonder why it takes so long to open. The idea of never taking out the garbage would never happen at home, but it happens in their inbox = attaching a 200 MB file to a mail message, and a) not knowing that it was 200 MB or even knowing what 200MB means, b) wondering why it doesn't go through and c) repeatedly resending it and d) getting furious at IT that the goddamn magic isn't working = attaching a 1 MB file to a mail sent to all 3000 accounts in a small liberal arts college, which has an effect somewhat like the Titanic hitting the iceberg. And the 1MB attach was a scanned copy of a faxed cellular phone service offer...scanned in 24bit color complete with every flyspeck.
The problem is feedback, it's lack. The mail software, indeed the Intenet mail standards, such as IMAP and POP and,almost all software, have no provision for informing the user when they are doing something very demanding (or stupid or abusive). When software and standards are written, they should include feedback mechanisms that inform and direct the users to appropriate use.
Our bodies (except for a very few and endangered individuals) has a pain mechanism to give us feedback. Software and standards need this too.
--
Stewart Dean, Unix System Admin, Henderson Computer Resources
Center of Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York 12504
sdean@bard.edu voice: 845-758-7475, fax: 845-758-7035
Oh, Stewart -- it's more than "marginally" related! It's completely
relevant. <big encouraging smile>
Esther
On Jan 10, 2007, at 7:23 AM, Stewart Dean wrote:
I sent Esther this about the need for feedback in mail software and
standards.I'll pass this on to more appropriate people but would like to
bend your ear on a marginally related riff of my own.
On Tuesday, January 09, 2007 3:14 PM -0700 Esther Schindler esther@bitranch.com wrote:
I'm hoping for a rather fast turnaround on this article, so please blurt out your first thoughts rather than plan on writing a nice, leisurely response. If all goes well, I'd like to get this article posted in the next couple of weeks.
What became of this?
I neglected my dovecot mailing list folder for a couple weeks and just saw this. I'd also recommend contacting the MIMEDefang mailing list (http://mimedefang.org/) and SpamAssassin (http://spamassassin.org/).
It's MOSTLY written and sitting on my hard drive. I was
breathtakingly thrilled to get a lot of good input from all sorts of
email admins (I have 30 pages of notes). But then I went out of town
for a week, came back, and am setting up to leave for ANOTHER week
out of town. So much for my grand plans.
Let's see if I can get this article finished while I'm on the road. I
sure do want to see it posted.
--Esther (who yes, is still listening)
On Jan 30, 2007, at 9:32 AM, Kenneth Porter wrote:
On Tuesday, January 09, 2007 3:14 PM -0700 Esther Schindler
esther@bitranch.com wrote:I'm hoping for a rather fast turnaround on this article, so please
blurt out your first thoughts rather than plan on writing a nice, leisurely response. If all goes well, I'd like to get this article posted in
the next couple of weeks.What became of this?
I neglected my dovecot mailing list folder for a couple weeks and
just saw this. I'd also recommend contacting the MIMEDefang mailing
list (http://mimedefang.org/) and SpamAssassin (http:// spamassassin.org/).
participants (5)
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Esther Schindler
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James Turnbull
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Juha Saarinen
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Kenneth Porter
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Stewart Dean