Spam Filters and Dopey IT guys!!

[bitingmidge]

Obviously if you are into IT and clever enough to be reading this you are not being referred to in the header!!

So! Over the last few months at work outgoing emails have been disappearing at random, and incoming just not getting in!

In spite of many denials by the IT chaps who get paid by the hour not to fix these sorts of things the problem continued.

One of the companies concerned was a major (capital M) law firm, and I had sent three identical messages with large attachments (each in two parts=six total) over a two week period, only the last ones arrived.

I was less than happy with the performance of the said firm, as I had no "return message" and amost thought they may not be telling the truth.

After yet another nil response from them, I sent a rather sarcy sort of email which resulted in an immediate response from the senior partner of the firm who had personally emailed me.

He advised that he had his IT gurus looking at the problem, because they had lost a number of important documents in recent times.

Off I go. Both off my nut, and off in search of why.

To shorten a very long story, that particular firm has a standard header on its emails incorporating its phone number : 3**6 666*.

Our "new" spam filter has a standard default which decided the numbers 666 were included in a nasty bit of spam, and blocked messages FROM the individual adress after 5 receipts. Others in the firm were blocked at random, and our outgoing messages to blocked individuals were also intercepted and shredded!!

I've read a bit about this sort of thing but never experienced it, but had to stand over the IT chap with a big hammer to suggest how to track down the cause (actually to even convince him it was at our end!), and white list the address!

No one has yet offered a satisfactory answer for the seeming "randomness" of the intercept. Are spam guards like customs officials, only opening every fifth package for inspection or what???

Please cast some light on this for me!!~

Cheers,

P

[Cliff Rogers]

As an "IT" guy of sorts, I know that SPAM filters are like 2 bob watches.... more trouble than they are worth.

The ISP that hosts our domain name has some very weird anti-spam rules so I have a Pigpond account set up I can use for anyody who is having trouble getting e-mail to & from us via our normal e-mail. The Pigpond account works that well that I'm considering shifting my domain name hosting to them instead.

[outback]

666 - The devil made me do it. At least that's what Hanse reckoned.

[Sturdee]

666 is a high rank with the Hongkong Triads.

May be they have been trying extortion tactics on them by way of email.


Peter.

[knucklehead]

Midge, we had a lass that just could not get her email to come through. Every one just patted her on the head and treated her like a bimbo that must be doing something wrong.

Eventualy it was traced back to the spam filter. Her name was Heather, the filter decided that HE AT HER constituted an offensive email and deleted it.
Therfore any email with her name on it was deleted.

[q9]

The problem is most IT people seem to think that inappropriate content is their problem to solve. I was recently working for a large gvmt dept here in qld, and I can't believe the rubbish they went on with...utterly mind boggling.

While you shouldn't have it a free for all, nor should it be locked down so tight that you lose more than you gain. But IT people in general love stuff like this, because they like to have the "power" that comes with the administering of the software, and because they "know" what is best for you.

It really is an attitude thing, and the reason a lot of IT people should be fired. And before anyone decides to lynch me for being anti-IT, I should mention I get to put "Bach IT" at the end of my name...

[ubeaut]

I have taken Spam filtering into my own hands with Spam Bully which downloads all of the spam (and we get heaps around 1600+ a week (243 this morning since last night)) into a file in Outlook. I can then do a quick scan manually to see if there are any that have been grabbed as spam by mistake at the moment we are getting about 2 or 3 a week. These are then classified as good email and won't be grabbed again. This has so far been the most reliable filter I have found especially for someone with multiple domains and email addresses.

Does take a little bit of time to go through but it is now around 99.8% accurate the best I have ever been able to get before this was around 98% and that's far from satisfactory as far as I'm concerned.

Cheers - Neil

PS Spam Bully is pretty discerning and probably wouldn't have picked up the Heather and 666 bits but if it had, it could have been corrected the first time and would never have happened again.

[arose62]

'Heather' reminds me of an early contract I did on a VAX/VMS system.

A new guy called Tissa Tilekeratne (gee, I still remember after, what, 20-ish years), saw me redirect some screen output into a file. He asked about the trick, I gave him a demo, and away he went.

Later on he complained that it wasn't working, so I wandered over to his desk where he showed me what he was doing. He'd used his initials "tt" as the file name, but in VMS that's a reserved word for the terminal, so everything he sent to "tt" was just disappearing.

I would have changed my name.

Cheers,
Andrew

[kiwigeo]

Dont get me started on IT help desks.....

Last job I came off my laptop hard disk blew up (not surprising as it was a Dell). Try as I might to convince the IT help person that the job should be assigned priority1 (=cant do my job without the problem fixed) the job stayed on priority 3 (=minor problem) for the 10 days it took to get it fixed.......NO computer for 10 days .

[q9]

That is surprisingly long for dell service. I've never had to wait more than a day to get a tech on site/part to arrive for anything.

[Stuart]

No one has yet offered a satisfactory answer for the seeming "randomness" of the intercept. Are spam guards like customs officials, only opening every fifth package for inspection or what???

Please cast some light on this for me!!

Only thing I can think of, is the "randomness" is caused because the spam filter is a learning filter- ie as it gets potential hits on spam confirmed, it learns from this and applys more intellient filtering the next time. It will oscillate around this point, getting more precise in its filtering with each iteration.

In general, for (non-corporate) solution to spam, I cannot recommend Mozilla Thunderbird highly enough. It is free (www.mozilla.org), written by the same people who created Netscape (that is before it was sold off).

It's built-in spam filtering is a learning filter, and so long you are diligent in telling Thunderbird what is, and isn't spam it gets smarter and smarter.

I personally get up to 200 spams/week (care off Monash Uni's email address list being compromised). However, after using Thunderbird for the last few months, and being diligent with the spam filtering, I now will get ?1? spam email / month in my inbox. All the others are deleted by Thunderbird automatically after 7 days. (In the meantime, it stores them in a 'junk' folder that I can check to make sure legitimate ones haven't been caught).



IT people wouldn't have such an attitude about "knowing what is good for you" if more people took some responsibility for the tools they use.

[Barry_White]

IT people wouldn't have such an attitude about "knowing what is good for you" if more people took some responsibility for the tools they use.

Gee Stuart

That made us all smart a bit.

But must agree about Mozilla Thunderbird I never get any spam but it transfers a few e-zines I get to the Trash folder that have some words in them it thinks are spam.

[Stuart]

Sorry Bazza, and all others -(quite a) bit of work bias coming through.

IT Instructor, and Helpdesk supervisor for the past 4 1/2 years (or should I say survivor). After a while, you can get to the point where 90% of the problems are caused by 10% of the people, and 99% of them could save themselves a lot of grievance if they just spent some time learning how to use the tools provided, instead of whining.

And before any personally directed negative comments about typical helpdesk attitudes- I was given the Vice-chancellors award last year for the improvements I made to service support from our IT helpdesk. Got me a new Jet bandsaw, and a new digital video camera out of it! Ok, tooting my own trumpet - sorry again.

Bazza, regards to Thunderbird, have you been unchecking any 'spam' that got caught by mistake? I assume that you have been, but if not, Thunderbird will learn from this.

[kiwigeo]

That is surprisingly long for dell service. I've never had to wait more than a day to get a tech on site/part to arrive for anything.

Dell werent doing the service.....was doing a job for the worlds biggest oil company...all the IT support is handled out of the USA. Even getting a password reset takes 3-4 days with the same company.

[kiwigeo]

Sorry Bazza, and all others -(quite a) bit of work bias coming through.

IT Instructor, and Helpdesk supervisor for the past 4 1/2 years (or should I say survivor). After a while, you can get to the point where 90% of the problems are caused by 10% of the people, and 99% of them could save themselves a lot of grievance if they just spent some time learning how to use the tools provided, instead of whining.

Stu...apologies on my part as well in case my post gave the impression all IT help desks operate the same as the one I was dealing with. Ive worked for clients with really good IT operations but unfortunately most of my clients are really big oilers and one thing Ive found is the bigger the company is the more they function like small governments.

Cheers Martin