[Mailman-Users] mailing list filtered as spam

[Brad Knowles]

On 6/26/08, jeff zemla wrote:

>  Really, I have no problem sending e-mails from my domain because I do
>  that through Gmail.

Keep in mind that spammers have hacked the CAPTCHAs for hotmail, 
yahoo, and gmail, and they are aggressively using these services to 
send out their spam.  About half of the traffic we see from Yahoo is 
actually spam coming from compromised or bogus accounts.

The situation with gmail is even worse -- not only in terms of 
numbers, but also in terms of what they're being used for. 
Unfortunately, a disproportionate amount of phishing comes from gmail.

So, while we might exempt Yahoo from our reputation-based filtering 
and filter their messages based on content only, we are much more 
loathe to do that for Gmail, because phishing is so much harder to 
detect.


Note that this is for my current employer, one of the largest public 
research universties in the world, with ~50,000 students and ~20,000 
faculty and staff, and we run the anti-spam filtering for pretty much 
the entire campus through our Ironport e-mail security appliances.

We're throwing away ~97% of all inbound e-mail as almost certainly 
being "spam", with about another ~1% being filtered out due to 
content.  That leaves millions of messages a day that make it through 
the system, and yahoo and gmail are, by far, our biggest 
correspondent sites.

Now imagine what would happen if we were forced to exempt gmail from 
our reputation filtering.



So, are you directly affected by any of this?  Maybe, maybe not.

Are you likely to get caught up and washed away in the spam flood of 
biblical proportions, in part due to your choice in providers?  Yes.

-- 
Brad Knowles <brad at shub-internet.org>
LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>