[Spambayes] Ideas for an MSc project please...

[Ryan Malayter]

[Christopher Jastram]
> (We were running a 667 MHz Celeron w/ 128 mb ram.)

How can you complain about the unreliability of your mail system, when
you're running it on 1999-era, desktop-class hardware in 2004?
Especially when you're a *technology* company? Hardware is CHEAP.
People's time and lost sales are expensive.

Yours was a failure in planning, not in hardware or software. Viruses
and spam have been known quantities for many years now, part of the
internet landscape. Certainly you figured they might impact your
infrastructure in some way. Why did you fail to plan accordingly, and
allocate budget for more robust MTAs?

Setting up a reliable mail infrastructure is not that hard. Read the
RFCs. Set up a reliable server on your site, with MX precedence =10.
Have your ISP's set up their SMTP servers set up to relay to your
domain, and put them in your DNS as MX=20. No mail bounces, it just gets
queued at your ISP when you're down. Same hardware costs on your end.

Besides, even if you have only one MX server, well-behaved sending MTA's
should queue your mail at the sending site for a few days, retrying
every few hours, before reporting failure to the originating user. Only
spammers and viruses refuse to retry gracefully.

	-Ryan-