Dave,
Yes, I agree with your comments below. I thought I'd just throw in an
alternate minority view. :-) Over the years RBL's have caused much
grief in the systems here. My personal belief is that while they make
an administrators life easier, they are bad for any business that can be
hurt with false positives. From my perspective that is any business
that relies on email for their primary means of communications.
So for what we do here, my preference is to continue to rely on more
deterministic methods for keeping the unwanted message volume down,
while at the same time keeping the false positive rate at or near zero.
Best Regards,
-- Tim
On 5/12/2011 12:09 AM, Dave CROCKER wrote:
On 5/11/2011 9:03 AM, Tim Kehres wrote:
I guess it all depends on what you consider a 'significant problem'.
The metrics
used to make this determination will vary from business to business.
For the
several sites that I run here (small in comparison), any false positives
represent a potential loss of business or a hit on business and we do
everything
we can to avoid. Other mechanisms used in tandem seem to knock the
spam levels
down to a level, at least for us, that are acceptable without the
uncertainties
associated with RBL's.
Hi, Tim.
The issue is not that some folk comfortably choose not to use such
lists. There are always such cases.
The question is whether they are in widespread use (they are), whether
they are deemed essential by those users (it is) and whether they
cause the cited problem (apparently only minimally).
False positives can be extremely damaging. I've nearly lost some
consulting business because my filters were overly aggressive. But
that said, the industry very clearly deems them generally a net positive.
d/