The State of Email
The state of email is currently “broken”. Spammers are only partially to blame. The inexperienced system administrators who employ damaging tactics to fight spam share a large portion of the blame for the break down.
I am spending a lot of valuable time each day explaining to our corporate users why their emails are not making it to their customers. They do a lot of business with colleges and small businesses. Most of these customers do not have enough money to hire qualified staff so they settle for the bottom of the barrel. These cut rate administrators are breaking email in the name of smaller inboxes.
One damaging tactic is to match the sender’s domain with the domain name in the sending SMTP server. For example, if I send email to someone from blog@spastech.com but the IP address of our server resolves to mail.google.com, they immediately bounce it back to me with a cryptic message attached that is of no help to the lay person. The SPF record is all but ignored by most junk email filters out there today.
Any good email filtering system should do the following:
- Quarantine all rejected email for an acceptable period of time
- Notify the intended recipient that an email has been quarantined. This generally takes place as a daily summery list or a web page that the user monitors
- Allow the intended recipient to white list email addresses or domains
- Notify the sender in easy to understand language why the email was stopped
- Inform the sender of the action required to get the email delivered. The action should be singular and easy to perform for someone who is not a computer genius
- Honor the SPF Record!
- NEVER silently drop an email without a bounce message
Email is mission critical in most businesses. The tactics being employed to fight spam are becoming more damaging than the spam ever was. Following these guidelines would at least mitigate the issues.
What do you think?