The use of internet mail has deteriorated to the point where a lot of people wish it had never been invented. In fact, we're one group of people who has had that very thought. The current protocols and implementations are fraught problems that are a result of the low security environment they were developed in, and are moving like dinosaurs to address the problem.
This leaves very few options for companies that do not wish to waste 10% of their operating budget on handling unwanted email. One of the choices is to be selective about where email is accepted from. Another is to review the content of all email in order to make educated guesses about it's relevance to the recipient.
Given that we received over 4000 UCE/SPAM emails per day on our site(s), it was time to do something. We have implemented both content based and ip based mail filtering. Our mail setup uses:
There are no lengths to which the individuals and companies responsible for this deluge of messages will go to in order to deliver their product information into our mailboxes. Even with the above in place, we still end up receiving and deleting over 200 messages per day!
It's the classic battle, what science can create, science can duplicate. The better the content filtering (Spam Assassin, etc) gets, the harder the senders of these messages try to find means to bypass them, leaving it a less than optimal means of stopping the onslaught.
If you've found your message has not been delivered by our systems, please read the rejection message generated. It will provide you with the name of the method your message was rejected by. You should click the appropriate link from those above, it will provide you more information about the cause and possible methods to resolve the problem.
The easiest means to get your message delivered is to publish SPF records for the domain. Our systems are configured to overlook the DNSBLs if the host is the legitimate sender for the given domain. Abuse of this (publishing +all records or sending spam via an authorized host) will result in the domain being added to our SPF DENY list, blocking it permanently.
As a last resort, we have created a special address that will allow you to send a message in spite of the above source and content filtering. By sending your message to:
bypass+<user>#<domain> at invlogic.comwhere <user>#<domain> is the original address with the @ replaced by a #. For example:
bypass+access#linux.org at invlogic.com
Initially, someone here will review the message and pass it along to the recipient, eventually it may become more automatic. I would not recommend sending anything you're not comfortable having someone, besides the intended recipient, reading. This will only work for domains which we are locally responsible for, it isn't a generic forwarder. We reserve the right to permanently block anyone who abuses this feature.
Copyright ©1995-2008, Innovative Logic Corp,