[ALUG] email bouncing ? |webmail how good?

[Mark Rogers]

MJ Ray wrote:
> James Freer <jessejazza at yahoo.co.uk> wrote: [...]
>   
>> AOL, yahoo and gmail seem fairly good for controlling spam and viruses 
>> from what i can gather.
>>     
>
> Excuse my surprise, but where did you gather that and how much are
> AOL, yahoo and gmail paying them?
>   

I think it's down to the definition of "good". It is, after all, pretty 
easy to completely eradicate spam altogether; just dump all email to 
/dev/null (or bounce it). Of-course 100% spam reduction doesn't sound so 
good when you also have a 100% false positives rate.

Once you start to take the false positives seriously, a drop in spam 
performance is inevitable. From what I can tell - and somewhat 
inevitably for a free service that has to pay for server capacity, 
processing, bandwidth, etc - the likes of Hotmail and Yahoo accept a 
higher level of false positives in order to achieve a higher level of 
true positives. Therefore blocking any server which has any hint of 
suspicion is a great tactic: you reduce spam by a large amount, and when 
you dump legitimate email you can blame the sender for using an account 
blocked for sending spam.

Then, by ignoring mails to postmaster@ etc, they get to pass the support 
problem on to the sender's provider(s). Result: a more manageable 
service, that most people will put up with given the price.

In defence of Gmail I haven't yet had any issues to deal with from the 
sender's side which can be laid at their door. Yahoo I don't have much 
dealing with at all, but BT Connect I do (largely the same thing 
nowadays) and get problems there. Hotmail/MSN and AOL are the worst 
though (anecdotally).

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Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0845 45 89 555
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