serinde

3/30: Professor Foo forwards a phishing attempt of the usual vintage (OMG UR OVER QUOTA, click here to fix) to the college mailing list, saying "Phish warning!" in the Subject, and removing the trawling link, but otherwise unedited

4/7: Professor Bar responds to the college mailing list, asking "Thank you but I do not see a link or password in order to do what you request. Is this still necessary?"

4/7: Professor Foo responds to the college mailing list, saying "I hesitate even to reply to an email, for fear that's a phish. Hopefully Dr. Bar is a real member of this list."

[Sfx: horrible grinding, buzz-sawing, metal-chewing noises from the construction elves out back, which is already driving me MAD, MAD I SAY.]

Long-time but often-annoying customer: "Hi, is there a problem with your mail server? Because I just sent mail to myself and it isn't in my inbox."
Your humble correspondent: "No, things are moving normally." [ed.: For a change.] "When did you send it?"
LTBOAC: "30 seconds ago."
YHC: "...I think that's within the usual standards."
LTBOAC: "Well it's ALWAYS INSTANTANEOUS!"
YHC: "Let me put you on hold while I look it up in the mail logs." *throw headset at wall*
[Time passes.]
YHC: "According to your procmail log, the mail was filtered out as spam."
LTBOAC: "That doesn't make any sense! Why would it filter out mail to me?"
YHC: *helpful hat* "Your filters will only operate on mail sent to you. They won't be used on mail that isn't to you."
LTBOAC: "That's NOT WHAT I MEANT! Why would it filter out mail FROM me?"
YHC: "Because a lot of spammers forge the From address to be the same as the To address, for that very reason."
LTBOAC: "Well why would it do that now? It's never happened before!"
YHC: "I can't tell, because you have your $TRASH set to /dev/null, so any mail filtered out is immediately deleted. If SpamAssassin filtered it out, the reasons would be in the headers, but of course we don't have those."
LTBOAC: "Apparently I'm not making my point clear. It doesn't make sense that it should filter out mail from me to me!"
YHC: "As I said, we can't see why, specifically, the mail was marked as spam, because you have it set to immediately delete anything marked so. If you want to know, you'll have to set your $TRASH to be an actual file name temporarily and resend the message, so we can see exactly what happened."
LTBOAC: "I don't want that! Then I'll have to keep clearing all the spam out of it!"
YHC: "That's why I said 'temporarily'."
LTBOAC: "Oh. Well, fine, if that's the only way." *click*

I was sufficiently annoyed after this to do some more digging. Whereupon I discovered his 586-line file of additional procmail recipes, most of which are timebombs waiting to happen just like this one:

:0:
* ^Subject:.*stock
$TRASH

I leave it to you to guess what string appeared in his deathless prose's Subject line.

Your "blacklist policy" is arrogantly, obnoxiously unhelpful. Yes, we can look in our logs to see that something was sent to you at X time from Y user (though we are talking gigs of logs here, so it's not easy, since YOUR time is apparently far too precious to bother with, oh, any identifying information whatsoever). But that doesn't tell us if the sending user is virused, or spamming, or just fucking well typoed an address. Not to mention the possibility that the user may be acting in perfectly good faith--that some jerkweed put in a known spambait address to cause them trouble. Think it's not likely? It's happened before, dearie. But we can't tell which of the above it is, because you're just too damn special to take a minute of extra effort.

I'm so very happy for you that you have your own little ivory tower where nothing can touch you, and everyone else can go hang. The rest of us are more interested in solving the fucking problem: if there's a virus, get it cleaned up; if it's a spammer, toss him. That's why the rest of us send each other actual data when we think another provider has a user with an issue.

I fully admit and acknowledge you have a right to block whatever hosts it pleases you to block.

I, of course, have a corresponding right to label you "fucknut".