New Spam Filtering Beta Testing

Originally Posted by opt2004

Because now I have mail that is not being sent because of this new Barracuda. I have an open ticket on it. In fact, you should be answering the ticket instead of responding back to a forum message.

Hello,

Unfortunately I cannot work 24 hours a day. to solve all your woes. Nor can Dan. This is why we have our support ticket system. As far as your email being blocked. I'm very happy the spam filters are working. Sure there may have been some minor issues in the beginning, but I rather have your complaint, then 100 client complaint's about Comcast or AT&T blocking. Yours is considerably more easy to solve in the interim, even with your colorful expletives!

Anytime you would like an education on how we do things here, and how we value your clients, please let me know!

[Tina]

I'm not really clear on all this stuff... but I seem to be having more problems with mail in the past few months than anything else. I put in a ticket cos six of my email domains on different plans were not getting through to me.... shortly after five were fixed and then the last one was... even before i got a reply I'm currently having a windows mail corrupted disk so was not sure what was causing it .. of course I have to two different problems at the SAME time.... regarding spam.... before I didn't have to look in the spam folder much .. but now I have to check it very carefully ... one of my clients all his email to me is marked as spam and bad spam at that... I finally (unprofessionally sigh) told him to use my gmail account addy and that works nicely.... my three main email accounts where i get my design clients and sell ebooks through I really need to work. Half the time they have not been.

A lot my legit mail which is all marked to go to folders ends up in the spam folder ... that's why I don't trust spam filters on my incoming mail .. why I don't have them turned on ...I need to see what it's catching ... the only thing it's good for is sorting most of the legit spam (is there such a phrase?) into one folder ... and it's windows mail doing that (I think) .... I just want my email to work ...glad that vortech is doing something .... I don't know how to deal with those emails that spoof my addys and even send them to me so if you can stop that I'd be very grateful.... this spf thing.... keeps getting mentioned but i've not seen a step by step easy to understand (with no bits left out) tutorial anywhere let (BIG HINT)... more explainations for those of use who don't understand that first thing about this would really help...

and is all this related to why my sites go down for hours at a time? I actually put in a ticket last time and was told it was denial of service attack so I guess it's all related?

It's all very tiring

Tina

[opt2004]

Originally Posted by Marc

Yours is considerably more easy to solve in the interim, even with your colorful expletives!

Expletives??????

[Tina]

I didn't see any?

Tina

[Brangwyn]

I'm a little bit concerned that a "live production" beta test is actually allowed to be done without at least giving folks a few days heads up first (seems giving customers advance notice of changes lately has just been thrown out the window).. I'm getting a few complaints about mailing lists not making it out which I presume is related. I'll raise tickets once I have the full info.

To assuage some of your concerns please note that this test is very controlled. We are watching the firewall very closely every day. The email issues that occurred yesterday where some legitimate email was being blocked has been solved.

As long as all your email that is being sent out has the following things, and is not spam, will more then likely be delivered.

1.) Valid From Address
2.) Valid FQD (Fully Qualified Domain)

Your message will more then likely be relayed. Please also realize this is just happening on 1 server and for only a hand full of domains such as Yahoo, Comcast, etc.

If your mail is blocked you will receive a notification and can contact support so we can investigate, deliver, and white-list if need be.

We apologies for these slight interruptions a very small amount of you are experiencing. With over 300,000 messages that are sent every day through our test server, of which only a handful have been blocked that were valid.

This solution does not come without growing pains, and sadly you can't have it both ways. We can't just flip the proverbial switch and fix all issues at once. This solution must erode over time so we can have a stable emailing network again!

Originally Posted by opt2004

Expletives??????

Originally Posted by opt2004

Marc's creditals just went out the window...................

expletive
(ĕk'splĭ-tĭv) pronunciation n.

1. A word or phrase that does not contribute any meaning but is added only to fill out a sentence or a metrical line.
2. Linguistics. A word or other grammatical element that has no meaning but is needed to fill a syntactic position, such as the words it and there in the sentences It's raining and There are many books on the table.


I mean this in the most light hearted sense .

[Brangwyn]

This solution must erode over time

Personally I hope it evolves rather than erodes, otherwise there will be nothing left! .. and that's also meant to be light hearted

I guess ATEOTD though regardless of how well monitored this is whilst your at work Marc, notification should have been given and implementing anything as a test in production seems to be contrary to statements made by Vortech in the past. Certainly Vortech doesn't like it when our customers test their applications on live servers and cause issues (nor do we) so I think Vortech should at least try to ensure that substantial testing of anything new is undertaken before implementing it. The last few things installed to "help us out" really haven't gone quite according to plan, Greylisting turned out to be a bit of a mess for a few weeks initially for example.

[Monzterdk]

anyway the tools is there and free too !!

spam assasin, spf, greylisting, RBL, Whitelists, blacklists, together these things do stop the plauge

it does i for me and many of my colleauges !

Best regards Monzterdk..

Originally Posted by Brangwyn

Personally I hope it evolves rather than erodes, otherwise there will be nothing left! .. and that's also meant to be light hearted

I guess ATEOTD though regardless of how well monitored this is whilst your at work Marc, notification should have been given and implementing anything as a test in production seems to be contrary to statements made by Vortech in the past. Certainly Vortech doesn't like it when our customers test their applications on live servers and cause issues (nor do we) so I think Vortech should at least try to ensure that substantial testing of anything new is undertaken before implementing it. The last few things installed to "help us out" really haven't gone quite according to plan, Greylisting turned out to be a bit of a mess for a few weeks initially for example.

I would like to state that 'test' may of been a poor choice of words. We were testing this appliance weeks before we placed it on our network do actual filtering. The only real test that is occurring now is using it in a production environment rather then in a controlled lab.

[cleonard]

Marc,

You should really look at your setup. I sent 2 messages to my comcast account on Sunday afternoon and at 11:00 this morning finally received what looks like a bounce message.

This is the Spam Firewall at barracuda-mx-01.hsphere.cc.

I'm sorry to inform you that the message below could not be delivered.
When delivery was attempted, the following error was returned.


<xxxxxxxxxxx@comcast.net>: connect to mx1.comcast.net[76.96.62.116]:
server refused mail service

Unfortunately from what I can tell, we can no longer determine what the forward.hsphere.cc IP is and it took 2 days to receive notification.

I knew ahead of time because I never received them through 2 vortech accounts but I did through mail service I have on another server cluster.

I'd be happy to share my comcast email account details with you for testing purposes if that will assist you.

Hello,

This is not the Barracuda configuration, this is comcast flat out denying our server sending mail to it. We are still working with comcast. This is forever an ongoing issue. They are worse then Spamcop or Spamhaus. If you would like to create a ticket with full headers at vortechsupport.com we will be happy to look into this for you.

Just checking in on our clients here. Has anyone experienced anymore issues with the Barracuda? I know we are getting some odd Comcast bounce backs that we're looking into.

Just wanted to make sure all your mail is being delivered!

[cleonard]

Originally Posted by Marc

I know we are getting some odd Comcast bounce backs that we're looking into.

That would be my preference for focus Marc. I haven't been able to send an email to my comcast account from any Vortech account in several days although they go through to from other server sources. Not getting bouncebacks either which is really strange. The last one which you have the ticket for, took a couple days to come back.

[chungmike]

Just a little feedback for our admins....

A few of my email addresses were spoofed into sending spam over the past few weeks and I had been getting about 1000 bounced email replies each day. Each day was better with only a few hundred bounced messages (I assumed the spammers were finished with me).

Maybe it's because of the new filtering, but lately I've been getting only 10 or so of the bounced replies. It definitely a welcome improvement regardless of how it happened.

I still get plenty of "regular" spam though.