Apologies for not getting onto this yesterday as I was involved in a meeting offsite all day.
Hi Frank, Since it was me that sent the original message I feel I should reply so you don't get the impression that I'm attacking you or anything...
This Ministry uses MailMarshall. I am not responsible for the way it is set up and I have complained frequently about the type of email that gets blocked by it. In the past, it has blocked, inter alia, the monthly messages outlining this list's AUP and other matters from the redoubtable Donald Neal. Given Donald's care with language and his email courtesy the mind fairly boggles at the thought.
I did pretty much guess that it was the IT department of your organisation that have the system in place and that it may not be your choice to use it, which is why my message was more of a general grumble about that type of system rather than a complaint to you as such. The fact that someone else's Mailmarshall blocked my second message was both humourous and incredibly well timed, and helped prove my point how stupid things like Mailmarshall can be :)
On average Mailmarshal as configured here seems to catch 50% of genuine spam 'aimed' at me (but is getting better) and about 25% of the blocking messages are false positives (despite recent problems with this list, I think this might also be improving incrementally). Nevertheless, personally, I would much rather have the spam. The record with virus filtering is, however, exemplary.
If Mailmarshall claims to be a content filter (eg censorship, basically, which is the impression I get of what it tries to do) then that kind of performance can be understood, but if it claims to be a spam filter, then this is just incredibly poor accuracy, far worse than something like SpamAssassin. As the Anti-Spam person here at iGRIN I have a special interest in systems which block Spam, which is why it frustrates me immensely when I see systems that make a half hearted effort to block spam but cause more trouble and annoyance than they're worth. (Particularly when I'm on the receiving end of that annoyance ;) (And in that category I include manual blocking of huge swarths of ip space, outright blocking based on most RBL blacklists, Mailmarshall, and Challenge response systems, all of which have unacceptable collateral damage and/or high annoyance factor to those who must work through or around them) If your IT department wont allow you to turn off MailMarshal for your email address then they're not doing their job properly IMHO. Part of the responsibility of anyone installing a site-wide or system-wide spam filtering system is to provide at the very minimum a way for individual users to opt out, and preferably a way to customize their preferences to a certain degree. In the case of SpamAssassin the important preferences are the required_hits threshold, whitelists and blacklists, and what to do with spam. (Don't scan at all, Just tag, divert to another folder etc) One thing I learnt when implementing a system wide Spam Filtering system is give your users choice. Let them turn it off if they want. Provide sensible defaults that are conservative. (Just tag, required_hits not too low etc) Err on the side of false negatives not false positives. Set up intelligently you can expect SpamAssassin to catch >90% of Spam with a false positive rate of well under 1%. With that kind of performance from a "free" program I can't see why people would *want* to set up something like MailMarshall...
Although I seldom post to this list (and when I do it is arguably off-topic on occasions), and most of the traffic is of marginal direct interest to me, I do find this list useful as a gauge of the temperature and general health of the Net in NZ which is immensely valuable for my job. However, if the problem persists, and complaints persist, I will remove myself from the list. I would regard this as being a very unfortunate outcome.
I would hate to see that happen too, its unfortunate that you're caught as the meat in the sandwich, one thing which is certain about the war between spammers and anti-spam people is that a lot of innocent people get hurt along the way, and IMHO many people involved in setting up spam filtering systems are far too militant in their attitude, and just as guilty as some of the spammers. (Spews anyone ?) I recently dealt with an ISP in the US who had blocked 202.0.0.0/8 (!) because "all we ever get from that netblock is spam from China". After enlightening him to the fact that 202.0.0.0/8 was much more than just "China" and there were whole countries in the south pacific that were being arbitarily blocked by this, who have *nothing* to do with China, he kindly unblocked it... ;)
And, by the way, and anticipating a message later in the thread from Juha, I dont ever recall his swearing at me (about me perhaps....)
Oh dear, you don't read this list enough do you ? Never take anything Juha says seriously, except when he's being serious, in which case its time for all of us to worry ;-) Regards, Simon