Re: Yahoo and their mail filters..

[Ken A <ka () pacific net>]

Jo Rhett wrote:
> On Feb 25, 2009, at 8:14 AM, Ray Corbin wrote:
> > It depends on your environment. I've seen where it is helpful and 
> > where it is overwhelming. If you are a smaller company and want to 
> > know why you keep getting blocked then those should help. If you are a 
> > larger company and get a several hundred a day, but you send 100k 
> > emails to AOL then it is not as big of a deal. If you are a shared 
> > hosting provider and you get a lot of them you should look into what 
> > is being sent to AOL, such as forwarded spam from customers 'auto 
> > forwards' (isolate the auto forwards to a separate IP address and 
> > simply don't sign up for the FBL for it).... If you have a good setup 
> > where only customer-originated email is being sent through the IP's 
> > you have a FBL on, then it is useful and you shouldn't get as many 
> > complaints.
>
>
> Ray, you don't get it.   What comes from AOL is literally every step in 
> a mother-daughter conversion.  You get to read the entire thread.  
> Loving chat, mother and daughter back and forth.  But one of them is 
> hitting SPAM on the e-mail *AFTER* replying to it and writing a nice 
> letter back.
>
> This is abuse of the abuse department.  This isn't spam.  Reading 
> through ~3k of these not-spams every day doesn't help us solve any 
> actual abuse problems.
>
> Feedback loops will not be useful until the providers of the feedback 
> loops accept reports about use of the spam reporting tools, and are 
> willing to go fix their user behavior.

I agree that aol could do a better job of filtering the outbound, but I 
don't think it's a useless system. We get a few dozen from aol a day 
unless we have a real problem.
I see the mother-daughter conversations (worst), the subscribed lazy 
user emails - we encourage our mailing list senders to include unsub 
links - partly to make it easy for _us_ to click and unsub these dummies.

And we see the 'real deal' now and then; usually an exploited php script 
being abused by spammers, or someone who has had their password sniffed, 
or stolen.
Most of these are users who travel and don't use secure protocols, or 
have a teenager in the house (the most insecure protocol is 
adolescence). We appreciate aol's efforts, imperfect as they are.

Ken

--
Ken Anderson
Pacific Internet - http://www.pacific.net