[Dovecot] Deferred emails on alias emails

[Jehan Pagès]

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 at media-brokers.com>wrote:

> On 2/5/2009, Jehan Pagès (jehan.marmottard at 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.
>
> --
>
> Best regards,
>
> Charles
>