This is the main problem with hardware-based spam solutions -- they may seem simpler from the purchasing point of view, in that you (the provider) pay someone a fixed amount of money on a yearly subscription basis, and they (promise to) make your spam problems go away. Trouble is, they often fail to deliver on this promise.
Bluewin management seems to be the latest victim of this train-wreck thinking.
Any good spam solution will allow customer feedback into either a training or preferably a collaborative reporting system. The interface for this should ideally be closely integrated with the capabilities of intelligent mail clients. Yet the hardware solutions we looked at (such as Barracuda) seem to offer only a tedious-to-use web-based feedback interface. Tedious-to-use means it won't get used, so the system effectively becomes a black box.
SpamAssassin, an open source solution, has come a long way of late, though many operators don't use it correctly, or set it up as a black box, with no user reporting capability. It's highly tuneable, but many just take the default settings that are made available with the periodic updates. It can be set to provide extensive feedback as to why a mail was designated as spam. Mails identified as spam are not simply rejected; there is a good deal of user-configurable flexibility as to how they are handled.
Effective spam management became THE criterion for us in selecting a hosting provider for our corporate web and e-mail needs. We looked at several Swiss providers, and made our selection accordingly.
Charles
-----Original Message----- From: Benoit Panizzon [mailto:benoit.panizzon@imp.ch] Sent: Thursday, March 15, 2007 10:03 AM To: swinog@swinog.ch Subject: [swinog] Any others having troubles with mails being rejected by:mail-fwd.mx.hostcenter.com
Hi all
Since Weeks we steadily get complaints from different customers (sometimes sending mail via our server, sometimes with own servers, sometimes using mailservers of other ISP) trying to send email to Bluewin Hostcenter Customers.
Their emails are being rejected by mail-fwd.mx.hostcenter.com.
The message from the Hostcenter Server ist: (reason: 554 Denied)
What I have found out since is: The Recipient uses the Hostcenter's anti-spam Solution. This is a 'blackbox solution' operated abroad, the Hostcenter Techs have no access to logfiles and there is not tech support abroad for that solution which could look into logs to tell what goes wrong.
It is impossible to find out why an email was rejected.
So the only thing I can tell our customers is: It's not working because the recipient is using a anti spam software which does not like your emails. Please communicate via fax or letter, just accept that email is not working and that we cannot fix it because the problem is at mail-fwd.mx.hostcenter.com and not our mailserver.
But the customers of course keep blaming us, because our server is 'not able
to send mails to mail-fwd.mx.hostcenter.com'.
I wonder, are we the only ISP which gets this many complaints about emails not being accepted by mail-fwd.mx.hostcenter.com or are others also affected?
Mit freundlichen Grüssen
Benoit Panizzon