6/7/2003 Getting tighter and tighter on spammers...

[jmbeach]

Originally posted by Vixen
Customers complain when their email is slow or late. We block the spam to enable to legitimate mail to pass through as it should and now that is wrong??

I REALLY do not get you guys sometimes.

Vixen, I don't believe we ever asked for spam protection. You guys put it in because you thought it was the root cause of the password prompt issue. From what I gather, that wasn't actually the case.

Why can't we all just chock this up to an experiment that didn't work. Unless if there's a foolproof spam blocking tool (which I think is fair to say there isn't) then why not let us handle spam.

If you were offering free email to everyone, we'd have no reason to complain, but we pay for your services. When the service becomes degraded to the point that we're not receiving email now that we were getting only weeks ago, it's fair to say that this isn't working.

Don't look down on us because you "do not get us sometimes." Look outside the box to see that you're actually playing spam God, and that we have no control, other than to offer our concerns here.

Originally posted by Vixen
I am at a loss how some people want to make this our problem when their customers utilize ISPs that are blocked because they are known to harbor/allow spammers. Personally, if I were on a network that was being blocked I would want to know so I could make a change. I guess other people do not see it this way.

I understand that innocent people get caught up in situations that they had nothing to do with but that is not an excuse (at least to me) for continuing to stay on a network that is considered a spamhaus.

Just my opinion.

Vixen, I can agree with you to an extent but there are certain ISPs that are simply too popular to just up and deny all SMTP traffic from. For instance, Comcast Cable is one of the largest, if not THE largest, cable provider in the US. As it stood earlier (although it seems to be fixed now) ALL comcast traffic was blocked. This cuts traffic out from MILLIONS of users. Many of which DON'T have any other option BUT to use Comcast unless they want to go back to dial-up. Trust me, I hate Comcast and think that they're service and network maintenance is terrible. But I have 0 other options which is why I am on them. And going back to dialup is just not going to happen, no matter how much I hate Comcast.

The fight for spam is a tough one, I know. I work for an IT consulting firm that has been researching and testing SPAM filtering solutions for our clients for over 16 months. NOne of them are 100% effective and none of them are 100% fool-proof. Some false positives are expected, but there is such a thing is being TOO extreme. Look deeper into the obvious answers and try to realize that it's not as simple as just 'changing ISPs'. While in a perfect world, it would be nice, we all know that this is hardly a perfect world.

[Vixen]

To be honest with you, I have personally never heard of Comcast, so I have no idea as to who they are or how large they are.

I know here we have Brighthouse Cable (aka Time Warner Cable) and you can also get DSL from BellSouth and Sprint. Honestly, I RARELY get any spam from TWC's network (they are also my provider), so I am assuming they do their job with getting rid of spammers. So, my question would be, if Comcast is so large then why not do the same thing & get rid of their spammers?? TWC is a LARGE ISP and they seem to have no problem maintaining their network.

[Vixen]

Originally posted by jmbeach
Vixen, I don't believe we ever asked for spam protection.

OMG I can not believe you. Maybe YOU didn't ask for spam protection but plenty of others did, therefore we implemented it.

Obviously, nothing we do around here will ever be good enough for some of you. <shrug> Such is life.

How about the next time the mail server is backed up because of spammers I will tell everyone to email YOU since you don't want the spam protection. Will that be ok??

[jmbeach]

Even if a provider finds out they're on a spam list, isn't it too late at that point to reverse the effects of that? Does that list get updated to reflect that they've taken care of the spam?

I guess I don't understand the checks and balances. It doesn't appear to me that there are any.

We're all sick of spam, but as resellers we can make our customers understand that there email address is there for all spammers to have, and that they may be victims of heavy spamming, but we cannot possible make them understand why they have to go throught the trouble of switching providers. This isn't much of a selling point for us/Matrix and is certainly no reason for any hosting customer to choose us over someone who doesn't use spam blocking.

Vixen,

Since I am not Comcast, I can't answer this question for you. However the fact still remains that I, as well as many others, have no choice BUT to use Comcast as our ISP. Whether or not they are responsible or not should not prevent us from being able to use your email services, especially since they are services that I pay you for.

Again, I don't mean to get angry with you. I understand that you are simply trying to do your job. All that I ask is to try and work with us a bit so that we can do ours as well. Most of our customers don't realize that we don't own our servers and I'd rather not tell them otherwise. However, if I have to explain to them that I can't change the fact that they are no longer able to send mail because I can't make the changes on the mail server, it would become increasingly tough to maintain anonymity. I hope you can understand our stance.

[glauco]

So, all customers not getting emails for DAYS or HOURS because spammers are backing up the mail servers is better than us blocking the spammers??

You CANNOT block spammers as effectively as I can. When I get a false positive, I add it to a whitelist. Quick and simple.

You cannot do it for me. Believe me.

I'm paying for the traffic I generate on your servers, and I've been paying until now for the traffic generated by spammers too.

And I'm happy with it, because I don't want to LOOSE EMAILS.

IMHO, you should leave us the choise to to use your spam filtering tool or not. Those who will not use it, will generate more spamming traffic and they will pay more, so you will be able to set up additional email servers.

Everything worked fine until a week ago. Please reconsider your policy

[jmbeach]

Originally posted by Vixen
OMG I can not believe you. Maybe YOU didn't ask for spam protection but plenty of others did, therefore we implemented it.

Obviously, nothing we do around here will ever be good enough for some of you. <shrug> Such is life.

How about the next time the mail server is backed up because of spammers I will tell everyone to email YOU since you don't want the spam protection. Will that be ok??

First off, I don't know why you still feel it necessary to berate your customers. I simply stated that I "can not remember spam blocking being asked for" - if you want to show me that post I'd be more than happy to read it.

You continually only see only the negative aspects of these posts. Why not understand that we post here because:

a) many of us have an issue with something that has been added as a "feature"

b) this "feature," while a nice gesture, is not solving any problems - as Admin said yesterday in a post "Psoft did not even install qmail right so POP before SMTP was not fully working right." This would lead me to believe that Spam filtering wasn't actually necessary, if it wasn't the reason for the email not working.

c) this is the only way we can collectively help you determine what works and what doesn't. Maybe spam blocking isn't ready to be added yet. Just like you won't use a BETA verion of HSphere, maybe SpamHaus is just in it's BETA phase, and not actually successful yet.

I think to assume that we don't appreciate anything you do is a foolish way to look at our suggestions. Some of us get hot under the collar, and some of us are as cool as can be. But we're all after the same thing... service that works and works well. We praise you constantly, and that's why we stay. See, we all have options to go elsewhere, but don't because you DO actually provide some of the best service out there. You should know that by now.

Lastly, I know you don't mean to say things like -

"How about the next time the mail server is backed up because of spammers I will tell everyone to email YOU since you don't want the spam protection. Will that be ok??"

- that's just you frustrated, but you can send anyone to me you like. At least this way I could still get the email.

[glauco]

I'm not sure if this point was clear from my previous posts:

I'm referring to emails directed to my email accounts (and those of my customers).

If you want to filter out malicious use of your SMTP server, for outgoing messages, this is not a problem for me.

I just need that INCOMING emails directed to my email accounts get through.


Glauco

Glauco,

Just to make my points clear as well, I'm in the same boat. I just need people from these 'blocked' networks to be able to send mail to Vortech hosted domains.

[admin]

Originally posted by jmbeach
Vixen, I don't believe we ever asked for spam protection. You guys put it in because you thought it was the root cause of the password prompt issue. From what I gather, that wasn't actually the case.

Why can't we all just chock this up to an experiment that didn't work. Unless if there's a foolproof spam blocking tool (which I think is fair to say there isn't) then why not let us handle spam.

If you were offering free email to everyone, we'd have no reason to complain, but we pay for your services. When the service becomes degraded to the point that we're not receiving email now that we were getting only weeks ago, it's fair to say that this isn't working.

Don't look down on us because you "do not get us sometimes." Look outside the box to see that you're actually playing spam God, and that we have no control, other than to offer our concerns here.

We have removed all blocks at this time.. So let the spam pour in!! I could care less now.

But just about every person here has said please help stop the password issues, please stop all the spam coming in to my email box.. I know you have said it yourself jmbeach..

I am going to say this one last time.. We have removed all spam blocks. If your mail gets backed up now, don't come crying to me..

But I do have something that will work that is coming up.. And for this little remark:
Why can't we all just chock this up to an experiment that didn't work. Unless if there's a foolproof spam blocking tool (which I think is fair to say there isn't) then why not let us handle spam.

Because it still uses server power to send you your spam I guess you think all these servers are free.. No they are not.. It is much much cheaper for us and for you, if we stop it at the server level. Remember every time you get a spam you are paying out of your own bandwidth for that spam.


And this remark:If you were offering free email to everyone, we'd have no reason to complain, but we pay for your services. When the service becomes degraded to the point that we're not receiving email now that we were getting only weeks ago, it's fair to say that this isn't working.

You pay $35 a month we pay over $30,000 a month in bandwidth and datacenter costs. This does take into account the THOUSANDS we spend on parts and new servers.



Here are my ideas to help stop the incoming spam. Setup a forum and you guys can submit any spams you may get kind of like google does for the RBL's but this would only be a block list for spams coming in to here. Let me know if this sounds like a better idea then blocking spammers that have not even spammed us yet..

[Vixen]

Originally posted by jmbeach
First off, I don't know why you still feel it necessary to berate your customers.
Lastly, I know you don't mean to say things like -

"How about the next time the mail server is backed up because of spammers I will tell everyone to email YOU since you don't want the spam protection. Will that be ok??"

Firstly, I don't see why you find it necessary to berate us. Like I posted last week, with me you get what you give. Don't expect to throw it out there in my direction unless you want it tossed back. To get respect you gotta give it. At least that is how it works with me.

Secondly, YES I did mean to say what I said about sending the irritated customers to you. We do what is asked by the customers and we get ripped into. We don't do it, we get ripped into. I am slowly becoming resigned to the fact that nothing we do will ever be good enough for some of you. That's fine. I am also starting to understand why so many ISPs, hosts, etc get to the point where they don't even listen to their customers. Who would want to listen to a bunch of screamers??

As Admin posted, everything has been removed. You got your wish, so don't complain when the email servers get backed up for hours by the spam coming through. I think all tickets that are submitted for future issues such as that, should be referred to this post so that people can actually see that this was requested.

[admin]

Originally posted by glauco
I'm not sure if this point was clear from my previous posts:

I'm referring to emails directed to my email accounts (and those of my customers).

If you want to filter out malicious use of your SMTP server, for outgoing messages, this is not a problem for me.

I just need that INCOMING emails directed to my email accounts get through.


Glauco

Nothing s blocked right now but take a look at http://www.matrixreseller.com/forum/...=&forumid=1064

[jmbeach]

I'm really shocked that you guys are taking this the way you are. So what if I pay only $35, I also only use 10% of my bandwidth - you're right, I'd prefer to pay for the spam that comes into my email accounts, than suffer the ill effects of not getting the email that is blocked but potentially not spam.

I am totally aware that it's cheaper to block spam than to let it through, but isn't it also true that it's cheaper to let spam through than to lose customers who don't get valuable email?

Come on, there are always 2 sides to every story.

I think you're service is fantastic, and you still don't hear that. I'm on this thread because I, like many others, are having problems with the blocking. If because of these issues, you with to pick me as the poster child for a spam filled america (world), so be it. I just need my email, plain and simple.

Now, tell me if I'm wrong or not. Was the password issue due to spam or PSoft not adding that POP before SMTP issue? I want to be educated on this one.

Originally posted by admin
We have removed all blocks at this time.. So let the spam pour in!! I could care less now.

But just about every person here has said please help stop the password issues, please stop all the spam coming in to my email box.. I know you have said it yourself jmbeach..

I think you could actually care on this one, I know you're just pissed at me. Admittedly I have asked for the password issue to be resolved, but you actually chose Spam as the culprit, not me.

I have been asking for "message body" filtering for @Mail for weeks now, that's it as far as spam control. I still have yet to get a confirmation on that one.

Why do you still think we pick on you? Kudos for trying, I'm sorry SpamHaus and the like isn't perfect. Can I say it enough that we appreciate what you do?

[javier011]

Is Yahoo blocked ?
I am not receiving my subscriptions (newsletters) from some business groups at yahoo.

Any idea?