users who get more than there share of spam

[John Baker]

I don't know if we can afford it but its worth getting a quote. Dealing 
with spam is such a continuous headache and time sink for me that my 
boss is willing to reconsider his standard opposition to appliances if 
its not outrageous.

Doing everything without spending money is actually written into my job 
description. :)
Julian Field wrote:
> Can you afford a copy of BarricadeMX to run on your mail server in 
> addition to MailScanner?
> 
> It will pay for itself very quickly in all the hardware that you won't 
> need to replace the next time around, as the load on the system will 
> drop like a stone. And you can probably throw out half your MX servers 
> too, and use the boxes for some other better purpose than processing 
> spam. An average site redeploys half their MX servers in other roles 
> after installing BarricadeMX on the other half.
> 
> That's my best advice for this problem, right now.
> 
> Jules.
> 
> John Baker wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I wondered if any of the experts on the list had any suggestions for 
>> this problem.
>>
>> I have a few users who gave their name to the wrong website and get 
>> way more than there share of spam.  I've been trying to figure out a 
>> way to bring those numbers down for them.
>>
>> Most of the spam coming through to us either doesn't make it past the 
>> geylist or gets marked  by the Mailscanner process and then sent to a 
>> junk folder by procmail upon delivery. These folks get hundreds in the 
>> junk mail folder every day and hundreds per week that slip through the 
>> process. It makes their mail unmanageable particularly as we are in an 
>> area where many of them still have to retrieve their mail with a 28k 
>> dialup connection when they are at home.
>>
>> At this point it seems as though improving the spam marking process 
>> for us would involve spending money on external services that we don't 
>> have to spend and it is working well enough for the average user. 
>> Would anybody have any suggestions on how to help users who get caught 
>> up in this sort of thing short of giving them a new address and 
>> bouncing everything to the old one?
>>
>> Thanks
> 
> Jules
> 


-- 
John Baker
Network Systems Administrator
Marlboro College
Phone: 451-7551 off campus; 551 on campus