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Some Anti-Spam Vendors Blocking and Slowing Gmail
fiorenza writes "Google's Gmail (and corporate mail) are being throttled and sometimes blocked by some anti-spam services, including MessageLabs and Antigen. Ars Technica reports that the blocking is a result of the Google CAPTCHA crack, which has allowed a deluge of spam from Gmail's clusters. Most users won't get blocked mail, but Ars confirmed with MessageLabs that Gmail delivery delays are to be expected."
With the current state of the world economy, no one will be willing to pay for something that they get used for free.
"The New Age. The New Beginning."
Umm... I have used a number of commercial email systems (in-house for major companies and institutions) and none of them could provide a service that was even remotely close to what Gmail does for free.
There were number of times where my emails are silently deleted from Hotmail or even gmail, so hey. Welcome to the world of screwed up SMTP protocol. And all thanks to spammers.
/dev/null. Want to filter spam? Reply with 5xx codes instead - not accept with 2xx and then bin it (unless mailing list headers found in mail, there you can drop spam)
Today email is less reliable message delivery medium than regular mail which is quite sad considering all transactions in SMTP were considered to be, well, transactions. An acceptance of email by destination means it is delivered, not going to
I am not sure what Google can do to crack down on this abuse, but they really need to. Have there been any improvement to their Captcha system since it was compromised? Are they closing down suspect accounts?
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Did you seriously just post an unsolicited commercial message in a thread about how unsolicited commercial messages are watering down legitimate communication mediums?
Username taken, please choose another one.
Oh, I see, if by "higher-quality email service" you mean a service that won't let most legitimate mail get through, while blocking a minuscule amount of spam, I guess you're right.
The missing part of this story really is that Google`s Gmail client has very effective anti-spam filtering. I can see why companies who earn their keep protecting typical client-side email systems, would want to make Gmail obsolete or ineffective. Spammers might use Gmail as a tool to spam, but with good filtering it really doesn`t cost that much compared to the loss of time spent weeding out ham from spam.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
I don't necessarily believe these free services are inherently low quality. What is true is that they are a massive target for spammers. Spammers get something from these services they don't get by sending mail directly by SMTP: DKIM and SPF authentication from (relatively) high reputation IPs.
Yes, they all go around blocking each other sometimes, but this is not new. I vaguely remember complaints about Gmail being blocked by Yahoo (or was it the other way around) a couple of years ago.
Then you haven't used Exchange, etc.
Exchange trumps Gmail easily. No Contest.
Regards,
Website Hosting
Commercial?! Psft - it was a viral-green-eco-friendly-lovein message, man!
Website Hosting
Q: How do you keep the majority of the spammers away?
A: Attach a price-tag.
Regards,
Website Hosting
and you certainly haven't used Citadel, which trumps Exchange by a wide margin.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
What can i say, Google gives me 7 gigs of space for my account, the most popular local ISP gives 100 megs, and this crappy service. Actually gmail is the only email client i've dealt with recently that isn't hell and a half to support. the anti spam service has been near perfect until now as well on all 3 of my accounts. :D
And saying thats its a budget service is just plain uneducated. its funded (quite generously, I might add) by the discreet, context sensitive ads you will find on the side of the page, as opposed to part of your internet subscription.
I have yet to see Exchange work well in any environment over a few dozen people; certainly not without investing large amounts of money on duplicate servers and hardware. Included is my favourite Exchange analogy: If the same method that exchange/outlook uses to store email were used in the real world as a paper filing system: Every document is translated into Greek, and the original is burned. Then they are all glued together into one solid block and stuffed into a magic box with a tiny slot, through which you can talk to a little gnome who somehow gets each message for you as needed. Sometimes the gnome gets confused and it takes hours (sometimes days) for him to sort things out; meanwhile he can't find your documents until he is totally finished becoming unconfused again. As an added bonus the gnome costs several thousand dollars and when he dies every few years you need to buy a new gnome. Oh and if the first box gets (arbitrarily) full you have to buy another special gnomebox, which of course costs $$$
Aaargh. I know this is petty and small but stop signing everything with regards. It shouldn't but it is really annoying me.
and you certainly haven't used Lotus Notes, which trumps Citadel and Exchange by a wider margin.
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
What they need to do is have a process for detecting when an account is spamming.
Now, you and I would just say "when an account is sending 10,000 messages a day" and that would be correct for about 99.9% of the cases.
I'd also recommend Google "seeding" the spammers databases with "spamtraps" (not tied to Gmail or Google in any way). If an account sends email to a spamtrap, that account is frozen.
And so forth.
I'm forced to use Notes every day.
Exchange is -years- ahead of notes.
Website Hosting
Our company uses Messagelabs. Just tried a quick message from my Gmail account. Almost immediately received the message. No delay for my account, at any rate.
And YOU definitely haven't used Gmail, which trumps Lotus Notes by a large margin... Oh, wait...
Wow, if you're having that many problems with Exchange, your sysadmins need to do a better job. Exchange is generally a pretty good mail/groupware server for corporate environments. If you throw an Exchange server together in five minutes, then yeah, you might have some problems, but as long as you think it through beforehand (and like with anything computer related, have a good backup strategy) it should work pretty well unless you have some really unusual requirements.
Every time you post an article on Slashdot, I kill a server. Think of the servers!
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
I remember reading a post about one poor hapless admin, who had come across an exchange server that was eating 10 GB of HD space a day, couldn't figure out what was causing the massive use of disk space, his company was in the middle of their most critical time of year, and he had 3 days left before the server crashed again and he'd be out of a job if he lost 12 of so days (since the last backup of that servers files) of e-mail.. it was an old post, and the people who had ideas were ideas the admin had already tried.
I'm fairly sure that the shit hit the fan and he took the blame, and i can't imagine a single reason why anything other than poorly designed malware, or a really rare hard to reproduce bug could be eating 10 GB of disc space a day...
If it had been recent i would have suggested he find a tool to let him add an external raid array for the OS to keep eating the 10GB a day until he had the problem locked down... but, it was too late for my advice...
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
That *is* funny. Though I have never had this experience with Exchange 2003 at any site I've managed over the past five plus years. In fact, our Exchange 2003 installations have remained rock-solid and stable. These installations range from five people to over 50. Very happy with the performance and stability.
::shrugs::
That is not to say that I have not seen Exchange 2003 tank. It happened recently to a colleague running on Windows 2000 Server. Lost his mail store.
But there are arguments on both ways of doing things: separate databases or files for mailboxes, or one monolithic mail store. I have seen uw-imap and QPopper eat mailboxes -- stuff happens sometimes.
But that is why we are administrators, because the technology is not flawless.
Gmail should go back to their old scheme, where you had to have a cell phone to receive your password, and you could only have one gmail account per phone. That would slow the spammers down.
If you don't have a phone, you're probably not a good candidate for an advertiser-supported service anyway.
Notes is a bitch to admin and has a serious learning-curve but it's absolutely bulletproof. It's also used in some places as a tie-in/point of connection to DMS. Like I said, I'd hate to admin it, but I love know it's going to be reliable (and I mean C&C reliable) when it's administered right.
Bark less. Wag more.
I will admit that Exchange 2003 seems better than 2000 (which I have had eat an entire mail directory; adios email until a restore is done, and you lose everything that came in since the last backup). The latest issue with Exchange 2003 required it to rebuild the mail store, which took over 24 hours to complete (granted the hardware wasn't super fast, but still we were only talking about less than 2 gigabytes of email here). The same setup, using a linux mail server storing email in maildir format would have taken minutes to recover from, rather than hours. And as an added bonus, everyone except the impacted mailbox (and most likely, the single email message that was corrupted) would have continued functioning just fine.
What? I've never seen an ad in my gmail when i use my phone.
Of course, the phone runs Windows Mobile so I don't use the gmail program, I just have it check IMAP every 10 mins, but who's counting?
One word: majordomo.
Cantankerous old coot since 1957.
for the past 6 months or so, the amount of gmail spam hitting my server has been insane. I've thrown up a pile of filters and what not, but sometimes the only solution is to firewall gmail off for a few weeks until the spam wave dies off.
If they want to treat their network like a sewer, then I have no problem doing the same, and dumping their ip ranges into the firewall with the rest of the spam sewers.
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
...to be safe from spammers using Google Mail... people should just -get- Google Mail themselves?
I don't know whether to just blink or to think that you discovered a Google strategy here; getting even more people over to Google Mail because there's less spam there; nevermind the fact that a portion of that spam is sent from their own servers(!) I suppose there wouldn't be a heck of a lot of incentive to do something about the spam accounts, then.
=====
Or maybe you're saying that Google should apply their spam filters for incoming mail to all outbound mail as well. That sounds a lot more sane anyway.
If a legit message is flagged as possible spam, ask for user input (make sure this can't be automated too easily) on whether it's actually legit or not.
Regardless of that response, if N messages in t time are flagged, have an engineer (okay, school kid) check it out and disable the account if necessary
And you certainly haven't used a telegraph. I only get spam about once every month or so, and I can usually ignore it by about the 15th beep or so.
Ginga no Rekshiya Mata Each page.
Most users won't get blocked mail
Okay, so business as usual. If users did receive blocked mail, they would be whining now wouldn't they ?
So Google's captcha got smashed, ho-hum! Happens all the time to others, and it is certainly NOT a good reason to blacklist Gmail, unless you also block all Yahoo and Hotmail.
If this causes your spam solution to slow down due to overload, the fault is not Google's, it's your fault for running an underpowered mail queue. Spam is everyone's problem, and we have to work together to clean it up. Pointing fingers doesn't solve shit!
-Billco, Fnarg.com
You mean they don't have adverts automatically inserted?
Wish I had mod points....
Blame the companies that allowed the idiots who buy from spammers to get internet in the first place. I know: everyone makes mistakes. At 2 AM, even I've clicked on a banner once or twice to find something (although I can never recall joining a site due to advertisement via mass mailing).
But, sadly, statistics still prove that if you try to hit 1,000,000 people without any true risk of getting caught, your bound to hit a sucker eventually. There's one born every minute, after all. Not to use colloquial phrases as my source, of course.
Personally I'm disheartened that American spam has lowered so. It makes it much harder to track down the parent company and call them and ask them why they sent you their e-mail in the first place...
Ginga no Rekshiya Mata Each page.
I have to agree with the other poster. If you absolutely must put "Regards," at the end of every post, at least put it in your signature. That's what it's for.
Also, "price tag" is not hyphenated.
You must be in some crappy shop running a years out of date version administered by buffoons then.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
The really nice thing is if you don't buy the superdupermondo version, you can add disk space until you turn blue and it won't matter: the mail stores in the standard exchange 2003 version are limited to 2GB, you can only have one, so be prepared to fork over more money for a version that is identical, except it doesn't have the limit. As an added bonus, feel happy that you could have bought a really nice linux server for the cost of the exchange software alone.
It's funny how a good backup strategy involves NOT using anything from Microsoft to backup exchange. I mean seriously, how long has been exchange been out and Microsoft can't make a backup program that can backup and restore individual mailboxes? WTF! Oh, and I don't want to take the store offline to do it.
Wait? Exchange 2003/2007 Recovery Storage Group? Maybe it's time your Exchange got an upgrade.
Since Exchange 2003 SP2 I haven't seen Exchange Database corrupt itself and I deal with servers running 100-200 users on single servers. These servers have had RAID drives fail, Power pulled from them and users do some really idiotic stuff. Databases always came back ok.
You could have really nice LInux server for Exchange money, but you would also have something with a bunch of half baked software that didn't have nice Desktop Client, didn't support your blackberry like it should and is asking to break when you update one piece of software.
Our on-line signatures are not so much signatures as rubberstamps. Sometimes people like to go for the more personal effect.
That is *completely* incorrect. In Exchange 2003 prior to SP2, the limit for the mailbox store was 16 GB. In SP2 they upped that limit to 75 GB, which really is probably enough for most of the small organizations that probably just have a single server running Exchange Standard.
Here is a document about it, scroll down to the part where it says Licensed Database Size Limit. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa998066.aspx
In Exchange 2007, Standard Edition can have up to five mailbox stores in each of five storage groups. And there is no limit on size. http://www.msexchange.org/tutorials/Exchange-2007-Store-Related-Changes-Improvements.html
Its also mentioned on the Microsoft Exchange page on wikipedia.
I'm not saying that Exchange is a perfect mailserver for (or worth the cost in) every situation, or denying that Microsoft does some really annoying things, but please try to get your facts straight before you complain about a piece of software.
Every time you post an article on Slashdot, I kill a server. Think of the servers!
usenet if flooded with chinese spam from gmail my mailbox filled with spam from yahoo. blocking both seems like a great idea. read somewhere that the captcha really hasn't been cracked, spammers have just hired cheap labour to solve them.
And go after the IP number and the individuals doing this shit.
Go after their ISP's and take the idiots to court.
Cat and mouse games are stupid.
>Exchange trumps Gmail easily. No Contest.
As a source for spam, and a plague of server-generated 'automated' notices, Exchange beats EVERYTHING.
Exchange is fine if you keep it where it belongs: inside a workgroup or protected by a SMTP-protocol filter (which is not running on the same box).
Recently I had to defend a customer who was the target of a DDOS... 80% of which were "bounces" from Exchange (forged From: undeliverables, permanent Out Of Office, DSNs, Mailbox full emails, etc). Exchange is pathetic in terms of controlling what gets "onto" the server.
By comparison, Google mail is a VERY good Internet citizen. They may have had Captcha compromised, but they'll plug it up. I'll them over their competition anyday.
Those are easy to shut off in Exchange, but it still requires somebody to actually be aware that it needs shutting off. Exchange may have stupid defaults, but every product is susceptible to that at some point or another. I'm sure whoever set up that machine and paid *such* close attention to it would create an equally bad sendmail box.
I would have to disagree, it's only ok if you don't know any better. I describe our exchange box as a 2 year old screaming child. It requires regular maintenance that cannot be done live.I cannot believe that large orgs use this as it is really only manageble in a small org, in which case there are plenty of easily setup foss software with far better support!
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of cats. MEOW!!
Then you certainly haven't used /usr/ucb/mail, which trumps Lotus Notes, Citadel, Exchange, and Gmail combined!
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
um the problem i mentioned the disc usage wasn't directly tied to exchange, it was tied to a 'feature' of windows, where it was endlessly consuming more and more gigs of space, at a rate of 10 GB a day. just wanted to be clear here, this was due to a 'feature' of windows not exchange server.
It just happened to be happening on a mission critical exchange server..
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
A good admin would have fired up Sysinternal's Process Monitor and found out who in the hell was writing to disk. Looking at IO by process would have pointed to the culprit pretty quickly. Of course you won't find step by step instructions on doing that by Googling, one would have to show some initiative, but a good sysadmin has a virtual swiss army knife of tools that they use to keep things taped together.
Hell, if the emergencies didn't pop up at the worst possible moment, what fun would be left to have?
I've worked both in the server room keeping things patched up and out front with the people who write the stuff that breaks. The server room is almost always more fun, every day is a new emergency, but that is what you sign up for!
(Besides, sysadmins with systems which never break may find themselves out of a job! )
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
Interesting that your "real world" scenario involves gnomes and magic.
Expect to see a technological solution, this isn't a company full of middle managers or people who are used to losing technical battles.
If I were a betting man I'd say Google will either A) release a new authentication/authorization scheme for creating new accounts, or B) they'll evolve their current system to be resistant to delivering false negatives on bot provided responses.
Because honestly, isn't this just graphical/visual acuity based Turing test that needs to be treated as "passed" by the industry? The reasoning being: the equivalent of Alicebot now exists for the graphical world, so the test needs to be re-engineered to test another (currently) unpassed Turing style evaluation.
Based on that realization: the whole reason capcha's are stupid is that if you keep the existing design but try and make it "harder" to break, the designer of the Bot need only account for that change and not an entire redesign.
All this sounds like a great technical challenge: think up a new Turing test... When in reality those posting go back to invite only are absolutely right but it's likely we won't see that come out of Google.
What? I've never seen an ad in my gmail when i use my phone.
In the early days of Gmail, you had to supply a cell phone number, and your initial password was sent to your cell phone via SMS. One Gmail account per cell phone number. This puts a dent in spamming; you have to keep buying new phone numbers as your old accounts are terminated.
Some free dating sites now do this. I've been bugging the Craigslist people to try it.
What on earth do you need 7Gigs for?!
Unless your going to email a movie!
I agree 10meg is living in the stone age but 7gigs just seems overkill.
~Dan
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
I have no idea what that analogy you're jabbering on about has to do with anything, but you should try to find someone with experience to build your servers rather than whatever paper MCSE you have running the show.
While I'd love to see a good open source alternative that can do everything Exchange can do, as well as it does it, but I've found Exchange a treat to work with since 5.5. Wow, if you're having that many problems with Exchange, your sysadmins need to do a better job.
Yes, and it also increases cost to acquire customer, decreases the number of potential customers at the same time(to those who have cell phones.) That would be an idiotic thing to do, when really all Google has to do is balance well-done features against poorly-done features well enough to acquire and keep you from switching away (switching costs on email can be kind of high with "unlimited storage" in play these days.) Ad impressions are ad impressions, even ones taken when composing an email that'll never make it to its destination. Bo hoo.
The old scheme was likely more relevant for early testing, although perhaps putting those spammers-without-cell-phones in the mix earlier on might have been a good idea.
It's to draw attention to his signature, which is an advertisement. Stop being so surprised.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
My 2 Cents... Show the user 5 images. Your job is to 1) Select the one image that is out of place with a radio button 2)Solve the captcha that is one of the 5 images 3) Choose which word best describes the remaining 3 images from a drop down/combo.
..1....2......3.......4......5 (Captcha image)
How this would work
Cat Cat Money Cat "Peaches"
Drop down choices (Housewive, Gutter, Salsa, Fruit, Cat)
Answer: 1-(Image3-Money) 2-(Peaches) 3-(Cat)
Of course this would only be reasonable for something one time only like signing up for gmail.
Gmail should go back to their old scheme, where you had to have a cell phone to receive your password... If you don't have a phone, you're probably not a good candidate for an advertiser-supported service anyway.
Since when does cell phone == phone? Tons of people don't have cell phones, and most of them are consumers of various goods just like people who do have cell phones. It's amazing how the 'net culture makes it easy to write off huge swaths of the population just because they don't have or want the latest gadgets.
While the 2GB size was erroneous, it is true that 2003 Standard is limited to a single mail store (see the article you linked to; it says as much). So prior to SP2 you were stuck with 16GB total size.
I find it typical that you start mentioning Exchange 2007; pretty much every Microsoft person recommended we upgrade to the newest software when we started having trouble with our Exchange server. Luckily we decided to get off the Microsoft upgrade treadmill; it was a pretty easy sell when we saw how much just the software alone cost.
Open XChange trumps Citadel by a wide margin.
Trying to install linux on my microwave, but keep getting a kernel panic...
Obviously gmail can't simply strip millions of us of the ability to use our accounts. If they didn't want those of us who are largely stationary, use a POP client and don't own cell phones, then they shouldn't have started offering POP access.
I've been running Exchange for ~5 years without any major incidents. My latest install is Exchange 2003 running in an active/passive cluster for ~250 mailboxes. In the 20 months that it has been running I only have a total of 2-3 minutes of downtime - and that's only from the 5-10 seconds that it takes to failover when I apply updates.
I would say that it has been extremely reliable for me.
-Nick
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
Yeah, because 2000 email messages is what? 4 MB of text, maybe. A 1TB hard drive will set you back about $250 at Target. $250 to hold a quarter million users' spam. OH GAWD, that's Sofa King expensive. A tenth of a penny per user. Wow. Where will your organization ever come up with that kind of cash!?!
In the meantime, I have three different email accounts that people have to CC to in order for me to get all my email. They practically need a fscking template to send email because a$$hole admins keep blocking their messages or mine enroute. Good job jerks. You've ruined email.
Spam isnâ(TM)t just a big nuisance; itâ(TM)s big business as well. So why is spam persisting? Ferris Research estimates that spam will cost $140 billion worldwide in 2008, of which $42 billion will be in the United States alone. If you compare these numbers with Ferrisâ(TM)s 2007 estimates of $100 billion and $35 billion, youâ(TM)ll see that the cost of spam has increased substantially over 12 months. Register for a complimentary Webinar conducted by Abaca and Ferris research to know more about how you can stop this nuisance. To register please click the link below: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=LPFKkdkFwOYltiQZtM_2bttw_3d_3d
. -. .-..
.- .-. --.
Hmm...
This could be interesting
. / -.-- ---
Ah goddammit!
Best analogy ever. Can you do car ones as well?
The CIA world fact book says as of 2006 there were 233 million cell phones in use in the US for a population of just over 300 million... that's a vast majority of the population with access to a mobile, especially when you consider the number of internet users savvy enough to want to sign onto gmail in the first place with cell phones is most likely an even higher percentage.
Perhaps the emails they have sent to report problems / issues are not getting through ... :P
Caesar si viveret, ad remum dareris.
Alright.
What's so special about Gmail? I signed-up for it a few years ago when everyone was talking about it, and I didn't see anything that made me go "wow" with delight. To this day I continue using my yahoo account, since everybody knows that's where I'm located (since 1997), and the Gmail sits idle. I couldn't find a compelling reason to switch.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
Please, people, SPF is broken, and so are all the other similar technologies.
For one thing, they are not standardised but in competition. That means most people don't use them. That means they are practically begging for a high proportion of false positives.
For another, the technical approach they tend to take is impractical. It's all very well saying big business should set up its DNS entries using this or that little hack, but most of us (yes, the vast majority of domains registered) are not running on dedicated hardware with full-time sysadmin staff who are paid to mess around with this stuff. It would be completely impractical for me, as the lone, volunteer-in-my-spare-time sysadmin of a small, local non-profit, to keep track of the dozen or more people who may legitimately send mail using our domain name and all the mail relays used by all the ISPs they use, and then to update our domain information accordingly every few days when something changes. Life's just too short for that kind of idiocy, which is presumably why of the small proportion of domains that do have SPF entries, a high proportion only say "allow from all", which pretty much defeats the point.
Don't get me wrong: I hate spam as much as the next guy. I set up some simple spam filtering on our incoming mail, using nothing but the standard issue tools our mail hosting service provides, and it blocks 95+% of our incoming spam with no false positives observed in more than two years of use. It's using one of common score-based systems that considers many indicators but will only block mail when the combination of factors is sufficiently strong to be very confident it really is just spam. It doesn't rely on any SPF or SendID or DomainKeys rubbish, and we do just fine.
Basically, the only people SPF is really hurting are those using poorly configured mail services that outright block incoming messages from sources without SPF because some know-it-all sysadmin bought the snake oil. Oh, and those of us who admin non-SPF'd systems, who get grief from these other people when mails they asked for don't arrive and after asking their know-it-all sysadmins they blame us.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I know exactly what you mean. Those slashes hurt my ears. :(
I just read Slashdot for the articles.
Heh, with Gmail you don't need an admin and it hasn't failed me once in many years, whereas Exchange has been woefully oversold [sticks tongue out]
How does this make the case for Exchange on the user end? How does ensuring sysadmins having a job correlate to a more effective system? Perhaps look for a cash cow in some other...ehem...[smart] way?
How about the fact you can't easily switch (and by "switch" I mean never visit mail.yahoo.com again) from your Yahoo account for free even if you wanted to?
With Gmail, you can forward your mail to an external address for life, for free. No lock-in! With Yahoo you get the annoyance of checking that original account "just in case" someone sent mail there instead of your new account, since you cannot forward from Yahoo without paying for it.
I'd recommend Gmail over anything else just for that reason, but throw in absolutely free POP3 and IMAP support and suddenly no other provider is even competing on the same level.
That may be true, but personally I like having control over the server (and the ability to easily do backups/restores if I accidentally were to delete a message or something). Also, AFAIK, I can't have Gmail push mail to my Windows Mobile phone (I can w/ direct push in Exchange 2003 SP2), or sync my contacts/calendar/tasks from Outlook, and from my phone. I have no doubt whatsoever that Gmail would be more than sufficient for most individuals (I have a Gmail account that I use for subscribing to stuff so I don't get annoying newsletters that I don't read on my real email account), but for a business environment, something along the lines of Exchange (or Groupwise, or Zimbra, or Notes if you must) is many times a better solution. Because they do more than just email.
Every time you post an article on Slashdot, I kill a server. Think of the servers!
guys you are invited to try out www.sawoutlook.com . A cool tool. Cheers.
Of course you don't need it, in fact I'd assume that's the very reason they can actually offer it, but that's not the point. The point is you have essentially unlimited storage for the foreseeable future, meaning you never have to worry about deleting mail you might just miss at some point to save space.
Nobody expects the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal.
Sorry to the other grammer nazi. I will do better...
Regards,
Website Hosting
A server of any OS has the potential for sporadically breaking out into inanity from time to time, especially if it is under constant heavy load. Not to say that you can't get a server up and running stable for 10 years that gets dry walled in to place, but the majority of servers (and software) is not that reliable.
It is up to Sysadmins to know how to fix the machine when the sh!t does hit the fan, because sooner or later it indeed will.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
What a bunch of incompetents. 12 day old backups for one, and a complete inability to open task manager to discover which process was doing all the disk writes.
If it was exchange itself, a mail loop was probably the cause. Older Exchange versions didn't totally prevent users from creating ping-pong forwarding rules with certain external mail systems. Again, a few minutes with simple tools like perfmon would have diagnosed the issue.
Give the same "admins" a Linux box and the same amount of training they had for Windows/Exchange, and the damage would inevitably be just as bad.
Management is the key in any IT system - we run Exchange and other Windows-based stuff with four-nines reliability. It is possible, and not even that hard with good controls and processes. The same can be said of just about any modern OS, and even most application stacks (although there is some truly horrible, unworkable crap out there in the vertical markets).
You don't want to backup or restore individual mailboxes. That's what the deleted items/mailbox retention feature and recovery storage groups are for. Using those features, you don't need to restore individual mailboxes unless you need to roll back by many months.
Backing up individual mailboxes is horribly inefficient because it breaks single-instance storage, and requires an index seek for each item being backed up. We did a test once, and our 60 GB exchange databases exploded to >200 GB with a mailbox-level backup, and took 6 times longer, hammering the crap out of the disk and CPU in the Exchange box in the process.
Think of it this way... would you back up each row in a SQL database table separately with individual queries? No. But that's what you're asking Exchange to do with mailbox-level backups.
That's mailbox store, NOT mailbox... One mailbox store can hold many mailboxes!
Just my $0.03 (At current exchange rates, my £0.02 is worth more than your $0.02)
I believe the limit for both 2000 and 2003 is 16 GB. Besides, SP2 added the ability to resize it up to 75 GB for no additional charge.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
None of those items you mentioned are in any way inherent to the design of Exchange.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Symantec Backup Exec does this though? I've used it. If the need arose I could recover email from months back or yesterday for a single mailbox. Users are dumb or malicious all the time. There are many reasons to want this.
I dont need 7 gigs-although you can use it as an online backup area. I just have 7 gigs because it was free :P
>Those are easy to shut off in Exchange, but it still requires somebody to actually be aware that it needs shutting off. Exchange may have stupid defaults, but every product is susceptible to that at some point or another. I'm sure whoever set up that machine and paid *such* close attention to it would create an equally bad sendmail box.
Apples and oranges though:
Sendmail: free updates, free security updates, free major revision upgrades
Exchange: Several thousands of dollars to upgrade, security updates are sunset for "old" versions -- thus people too "cheap" to upgrade Exchange end up running insecure setups. Actually, "cheap" isn't fair.. I've seen Exchange shops where IT was incapable of attempting a +1.0 version upgrade on Exchange.
So 2 points against Exchange in terms of staying secure and up to date. This of course demonstrates itself in the real world... there are tens of thousands of Exchange 2000 (and even Exchange 5.5) systems out there spewing Delivery Status notices, Out of Office, blindly accepting email wildcarded for their domain (no SMTP rejection possible upon a bad RCPT TO mailbox), etc.
Perhaps Exchange 2007 is better in this respect by default, but that's not my point... the installation base is a tiny fraction of Exchange 2K and 2K3, and will be for years to come. If Microsoft ever decided to spare the Internet, they would time-bomb their servers or lease their servers as a subscription service. They make it hard for their mistakes to disappear.
>None of those items you mentioned are in any way inherent to the design of Exchange.
Weasel wording or useless semantics.
Perhaps Exchange was not DESIGNED (ie, intended) to be that way, but it IS. You are simply unaware of this real world fact, or find the truth inconvenient. *shrugs*
In a properly managed Exchange system, there's almost no reason to want mailbox-level backup. Deleted items and deleted mailbox retention cover almost all of the situations where you would want a mailbox-level backup, without requiring any type of restore or 3rd party software. In the very infrequent case of needing really old data not covered by deleted items retention, you can restore a whole database using a recovery storage group and move items indiviudally from there.
Yes, many tools do mailbox-level backups, but they are really inefficient, and quite brittle and buggy. Have you tested a restore this way?
Also, there is no way to do reliable incremental backups with per-mailbox tools. There is no Microsoft API for individual mailbox backup, so these tools impersonate an Outlook client (using MAPI) to suck down messages. Finally, a real exchange backup does a check of all database pages for corruption during the backup. You don't get that very important feature with mailbox-levelbackups.
See this link for some more details.
But that misses the point entirely. I don't have the hard drive space to have deleted item retention set to that length of time.
Then you don't have the hard drive space to completely restore your backups either!
When you restore from a mailbox-level backup, single-instance-stoage (SiS) is broken. Every message you restore is inserted into the Exchange database separately. At my site, our SIS ratio (which can be seen using perfmon) is 5.6, meaning each email message is sent to 4.6 people on average (plus one copy in sent items), but only stored once.
Assuming your site's ratio is similar, if you had to restore all of your mailboxes using a mailbox-level backup, you would need 5.6 times as much disk space as you currently use for Exchgange databases!
Have you ever done a full test restore? If not, you're in for some rude surprises.
Disk space is CHEAP. Data loss and down time are not. We use a deleted items retention period of 180 days, and it only increases our Exchange database sizes by about 30%
I don't want mailbox level backups to restore all of them at the same time. I want them to restore one mailbox.
(1) If I never abandon Yahoo, why would it I need to forward my emails someplace else?
(2) Yahoo has POP3 and IMAP support (it's how I read my pop.psu.edu account).
Like I said, I just don't see any reason to abandon yahoomail and switch to googlemail. (Of course, I also still use a Commodore=64 and Amiga 500, so maybe I just like to cling to old things.) (shrug)
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
So you're doing regular full database backups as well as mailbox-level backups? That's fine, I suppose, so long as you have the backup window and tape/disk media space to spare.
I still suggest testing a full restore of Exchange regularly, as well as mailbox-level test restores.
Hi guys! Just wanted to say a few words about my way to deal with spam - I use Gafana.com - that'sin my opinion the best anti-spam solution ever! Has anyone of you tried it?
Yeah, I knew that, but what does having a cell phone have to do with using their ad-supported service?
I only ever see ads on their website, I don't get SMS spam from them (or anyone else for that matter) or in my phone's inbox.