ml hacks for goodmail

Wed Feb 8 10:25:52 UTC 2006

On Tuesday 07 Feb 2006 22:08, Florian Weimer wrote:
>
> As far as I can tell, the filters at AOL are far less problematic than
> crude filters at smaller sites which simply use SORBS or
> bl.spamcop.net.

Not here, no one cares if some small bit player has stupid filters, but when a 
significant volume of your email goes somewhere stupid filters hurt, queues 
build, users complain, and we are a bit player in the email world.

We have a regular email to a customer rejected weekly by AOL because it 
contains a "banned URL".  Wouldn't be so bad, but it contains web referer 
stats, so is nothing but URLs. We've no idea which URL it is, and I'm not 
doing a binary filter approach to work around their broken filters.

Simplistic content only based rejection of email is just a broken model, as is 
using end-user input in too simplistic a fashion (end users make too many 
mistakes), AOL do both. I manage to filter all my personal email with no 
content inspection over and above "no Windows executable attachments here - 
thank you", no end user interaction, no silly places where falsely classified 
email stagnates, it really isn't difficult to deploy filters like this.

But I thought the whole thing looked like a marketing campaign for Goodmail, 
and nothing more.