SOHO Email Hosting or Alternatives

[Ben Scott]

On 4/24/07, Lloyd Kvam <lkvam at venix.com> wrote:
> I assume my server tolerance for "bad
> email" matches reasonably well to the final server (Maybe it's fussier).

  Ahh.  That should work pretty well, then.

  I had a client once who wanted everyone forwarding their mail to
different systems, and with no spam control on the forwarder, since
everyone wanted to keep their existing anti-spam solution.  I
eventually gave up and told Sendmail not to generate DSNs.  It was
what they wanted... ~shrug~

> One other item I've noticed.  More and more mail servers are not
> bothering to report delivery failures.

  Yah.  Backscatter is a huge problem -- as big as the spam itself.
If a message is judged to be spam, it is considered a very bad idea to
omit a new SMTP envelope in response.  Rejecting during the sender
SMTP transaction is okay.  But rejecting during SMTP requires
real-time spam analysis, which is expensive.  So most of the time,
spam filtering is done in batch fashion, which means no notification
to the (usually forged) sender.

-- Ben