What are your thoughts on.....

In article , Peter Duniho wrote:
snip: only 2 legitimate emails a day/why email?
I only get a couple of phone calls a day. I still have a phone.
Difference is my phone doesn't get spammed. Even on days where I get ten
or eleven legitimate emails, having to pick them out from over 100 spam
emails is not feasable so filtering has to be employed.

I don't know why this is so hard for you guys to grasp. You keep claiming
that the service isn't doing what I say that it does do. I know what it
does, I spent a huge amount of time learning about it (when the bounces
first started happening, I didn't have any idea why), and I know for a fact
that it is blocking perfectly legitimate email for absolutely no good
reason.

No, I'm not. I don't make any claims as to what your ISP does. My
article was about a particular approach with RBLs, and that was to use a
combination of the SBL-XBL and SpamAssassin. The former does not block
ISPs smart hosts. The SBL-XBL is one of the more conservative RBLs -
it's not SPEWS.

The whole concept is paternalistic crap. It punishes ISPs, especially the
largest ones (since they have the most exposure)

The SBL-XBL doesn't list any of the large ISP's smarthosts. AOL et al.
get delivered fine. AOL is also doing useful things like putting SPF
(http://spf.pobox.com) records in their DNS zones so I can tell if mail
claiming to be from AOL really is from AOL before I accept it (a lot of
spam comes with forged AOL headers. SpamAssassin can score against
forged headers).

Spam filtering is well and good but any proper solution will NEVER EVER
block legitimate email. One single false positive is simply unacceptable.

This is impossible. If you get a lot of spam, even filtering by hand still
gets false positives - either that or you spend several hours a day
making doubly sure you're not going to hand-filter ham as spam, in which
case email becomes cost-ineffective. I know that before SA/SBL-XBL I
accidentally deleted emails because they looked to me like spam.

To be honest, I wouldn't consider email a reliable method of
communication thanks to the spammers. Things like SPF will help as it
will mean we can tell if From: headers are forged from the get-go, but
unless ISPs get more agressive about stopping the spam problem (giving
users firewalled access by default instead of anything goes - definitely
blocking outbound port 25, rate limiting their smart hosts so
residential users are limited on how many emails they can send per day
etc.) it's only going to get worse.

--
Dylan Smith, Castletown, Isle of Man
Flying: http://www.dylansmith.net
Frontier Elite Universe: http://www.alioth.net
"Maintain thine airspeed, lest the ground come up and smite thee"