I have send You an email regarding trying Your webinterface. Don't now if this is still possible?

/Bo :)

 

is it publicly published and what is the url i should be able to see it at, so that i can see what error is displayed?

 

cheers

 

However to do a lookup and replace on every clean message would be frought with problems (performance etc..) this is also sitting outside what we are there to do which is not alter the original message but simply filter out spam.

 

I think it would be very few clients that would understate there usernumber and if the users have individual logins then i would be surprised if any will activley avoid paying you a fair price.

We charge on a per email address, every email address that receives email must be specifically defined in our GUI.  If it is not defined, email is bounced so we don't care if it is a group list etc.

That is why we would like to provide 'free' aliases, only if we have a way to control the target mailbox ourselves and not rely on the recipient server to do it.

Currently.

Customer x signs up for your service. They say we have 20 users, so you charge them accordingly (Trust them), although they may have 30 valid email adresses (including groups, aliases, etc..) but your database will receive mail for a lot of other addresses as you have spammers guesing at addresses (johndoe@widget.com )

 

What I would suggest.

Do your billing based on the number of logon addresses for the web interface. In my daily email report i send a report to every email address that does not have a valid logon or exists on an alias, but does have email in its quarantine folder, letting them know that there are email in quarantine for them and they need to register to view/release. This gets them to pretty quickly register, allowing you to track the users. (See note below about the frequency of this email)

I think if you were to trial this billing method with your clients you would find that the ammount of logon's would be pretty close to the clients correct number (assuming they are telling you the truth).

 

For them to avoid paying you this they would need to create an logon that is either checked by one person or a group of people. This would be counter productive to any organisation as they would need to trust one person to sift through a LOT of messages, and potentially miss emails.

 

In my opinion the only way a company might consider centralizing the management of all the staffs email addresses is if they were very small ( 5 or less).  And in this case you need to manage that client and ensure that the ammount they are being charged is value.

 

As for the server knowing how many of the addresses are users, i can see no way to do this. Unless you are also providing the mailboxes and have these users in your active directory. Assuming that you are recieving the messages and then forwarding clean mail to there server. Then there is no possible way of telling the difference between a users email address vs an alias/group address.

 

What are you doing with the users outgoing emails. Do you provide them with an outgoing connection? if so then you could look at the reply email address and store these as most will have unique reply to's, this also allows you to filter and capture the receivers abnd add them to the users whitelist (eg if andrew@wdget.com sends a message to yapadu@somewhere.com then yapadu is added to andrew's whitelist, This would get around the worst complaint that i get from users which is why did yapadu@somewhere.com get quarantined when he has been allowed for the past 2 years. The reason may be that his message suddenly failed a keyword check but because he had never been caught, and released in the past he was never added to the whitelist. By capturing all the users outgoing email recipients and dynamically building a whitelist this allows you to be a lot more agressive with your filters.

 

The downside to providing an outgoing smtp is that you are greatly increasing the traffic through your server (note it doesnt need to be the same server that provides your incoming) and as such you are paying for that traffic data. So its a catch 22.

 

i am currently working on various idea's to this.

1. provide an outgoing with automatic capture of receivers emails. As detailed above.

2. Provide a small exe to the clients that periodically scans there active directory for the number of user accounts (excluding known bogies eg, administrator, iusr_xxx, etc..) it will also look at the exchange log and build a list of receivers that they have sent mail to. This will then connect to my server and update the clients records.

 

Your thoughts on this would be great.

 

Cheers

I have been asking Roberto if there is any way to do domains/aliases/catchall type addresses, at the server level.

We charge our clients on a per email address basis, which causes a couple of problems with the current spamfilter implementation so I was hoping you had done some magic that allowed true aliases.

We don't have any problem with allowing aliases or catch all.  For example if you were andrew@widget.com and also sales@widget.com we would ideally like to charge you for only a single email address.

However the way it is currently I can't find a solution to do this with spamfilter.

Lets assume you are andrew@widget.com, we will give you an unlimited number of aliases no problem as it all goes into the same andrew mailbox....  but spamfilter can't do that unless there is some way to have spamfilter change the incoming aliases to actually go to andrew@widget.com.

Same is true for catchall type addresses (why anyone uses those is beyond me!).  No objection to a catch all if messages could actually be directed to a specific address.  Otherwise we end up ripping ourselves off.

Since your alias system is at the quarantine level, would you see any value in having the ability to do real aliases at the server level?

If you send me a message with your email address i will send you the code to my current lite version of the site. It is in ASP so i am unsure if you are using ASP or PHP.

 

But to answer your question.

I keep a table called Alias, Field1 = Logon_Email Field2 = Alias

then when the logon i retrieve all there alias's and store them into a session variable with them all listed with there logon email and a comma in front and behind. (Eg. ,logon@mydomain.com.au,Alias1@mydomain.com.au,alias2@mydomain.com, )

 

Then when i do my query..