Help Us Prevent Being Blocked Again

[agsteele]

Is there a way to separate this behavior (replying to a spam message) from actual spamming?  We have 8,000 users and I cannot control the behaviors of all of them.

39148[/snapback]

Phil,

Thanks for being constructive in trying to tackle the spam problem.

Because you haven't provided a great deal of data we have to guess at the reasons some of your users are sending messages to spam traps.

But on the assumption that they are not actually spamming, the most likely reason for them would probably be that they have some form of auto-responder in operation. Given that this probably blew up over the Christmas/New year period I'd even guess that they had set up vacation responders.

Of course, then every bit of spam gets an auto-reply which goes straight back to the forged sender address - often a spam trap - and the listing kicks in.

Auto-responders that are set to indiscriminately reply to every message are now generally disparaged and I understand that many organisations now only auto-respond to a white-list of contacts - and many simply don't allow auto-responses at all. See http://www.spamcop.net/fom-serve/cache/329.html for a page you could refer your users to.

If my guess is correct then you have an uphill struggle to educate the users but it is an education that is worthwhile. And they'll get the message if they recognise that their contacts will start refusing to receive Emails as a result.

Good luck with the process...

Andrew

[Miss Betsy]

Wasn't filtering outgoing mail with the spam filters mentioned as a way to prevent people from sending emails to the return path?

Of course, education of the end users is the best way to go. Tell people what happens, tell them what happens when they are not good netizens, tell them what you are doing to prevent them if they forget, or won't cooperate. And do it in simple language without a lot of details. If they understand the concept, that's all they need. I don't know the details about how my automobile engine works, but I do understand the concept. I also am fairly foggy about how email works, but I understand what happens when people use auto responders. Run it past your sales force and make sure they understand. Ask for their comments on what you are trying to do.

If you do it 'right', your customers will be happy with you.

Miss Betsy