Webmail Spam Filters...

[theshadowhost]

Hundreds of students forwarding all their University e-mail is what gets us blacklisted on Hotmail every time a mass-mail goes out. It's a foolish idea and it has no relevance to Duggeh's problem.

Yes, good. Blame the users.

Sorry, who or what else would you like me to blame? If 200 identical e-mails hit 200 Hotmail addresses within 30 seconds of each other, what do you think Hotmail's spam detection system does?

I know gmails let's it through.... if people forward to hotmail and hotmail sets up blocking then they will have to worry about that wont they.

but you can't really blame anyone for changing though webmail is really slow.

[Fawksie]

if people forward to hotmail and hotmail sets up blocking then they will have to worry about that wont they.

It's not just the people who forward that are affected when it happens, the whole University gets put on the blacklist, and it's ITS that has to worry about it. If a member of University staff or a society or a student attempts to send mail from our SMTP servers to Hotmail, it bounces. It's very inconvenient.

[eagle]

Would it make sense to outsource the whole system to Gmail, so that Googlemail handles all the email instead?
That way, the system would probably work better, there'd be better features, and ITS would be able to concentrate on other matters.

[amac]

Hundreds of students forwarding all their University e-mail is what gets us blacklisted on Hotmail every time a mass-mail goes out. It's a foolish idea and it has no relevance to Duggeh's problem.

Yes, good. Blame the users.

Sorry, who or what else would you like me to blame? If 200 identical e-mails hit 200 Hotmail addresses within 30 seconds of each other, what do you think Hotmail's spam detection system does?

There are two reasons people forward to hotmail:
1. Because it's better: faster, vastly more storage, modern design.
2. Because ITS actively support forwarding of emails.

You can't provide a service then criticise people when they use it.

Would it make sense to outsource the whole system to Gmail, so that Googlemail handles all the email instead?
That way, the system would probably work better, there'd be better features, and ITS would be able to concentrate on other matters.

Yes.

[RandomMusings]

There are two reasons people forward to hotmail:
1. Because it's better: faster, vastly more storage, modern design.
2. Because ITS actively support forwarding of emails.

I personally used to like Hotmail, but the new Windows Live Hotmail has some annoying features which I don't like.
G-mail is, however, something I really do like. I find it's calendar function very useful for the kinds of things I do, although I know there are many other providers of this kind of service. G-mail just seems the most logical.

[Fawksie]

Forwarding is not likely to be an option after the mail system gets overhauled. And I very much doubt that the University is going to farm out mail service to Google. Napier have just done the same, only with Windows Live Hotmail, and the security implications are quite concerning.

[eagle]

But when is the system likely to be overhauled?

[Fawksie]

No idea

[sat]

No idea

I'm not even sure they've rebooted the mail server for a while: we learned a while ago that the reason WiredSoc mail was rewritten as "students-wired-society" was that they hadn't restarted the mail daemon that does the rewriting.* So when a full overhaul will come is anyone's guess.





* There are almost certainly others here who would have a better knowledege of this. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

[Thackary]

Is there a reason why most society email addresses have been re-named with 'mail' in the title? Surely the @ symbol gave enough suggestion that it was an email address?

Are they making it overly complicated?

[Fawksie]

Both of those are down to the mail admin's personal crusade in making sure that everyone fully understands that

a) mail that comes from WiredSoc has nothing to do with the rest of the University
b) e-mail addresses are in fact... err... e-mail addresses.

[Jono]

Is there a reason why most society email addresses have been re-named with 'mail' in the title? Surely the @ symbol gave enough suggestion that it was an email address?

Are they making it overly complicated?

I had that problem when getting hold of PA's email account. A lot of the societies emails are under the old secondary accounts system, which are linked to an individual's personal email address. Getting hold of them, transferring them, and allowing additional people permission was, frankly, a tremendous faff-around, so we went for the alternative; setting up a new non-personal account. For some reason the old account couldn't just be deleted, and the name retained.

Emails are overly complicated just like the rest of St andrews IT provisions.

[MrT]

The webmail interface only lets you delete these filters one at a time, and because of the page load times caused by the size of the list, it takes at least 20 seconds for each deletion. That works out at like 50 years to remove them all.

Naturally, I contacted ITS about this and asked them to reset or delete the spam filters list. I have been told however, that such an action lies beyond their powers.

That to me sound, frankly, at least surprising, in general unacceptable and at most downright bullshit. What would be the difficulty if they've got all the dials and buttons at their end?

I don't suppose that anyone might have an alternative solution, the option of sitting for a whole day developing RSI deleting these things is not open for consideration.

This sounds like a mis-understand and communication problem.

I would try again, and ask your request of 'deleting all Webmail filters' to be forwarded to the Webmail administrator.

Or just email the Helpdesk and a call is generated and forwarded to the right people in ITS to fix your problem.