[General] Default Address / Anti Spam Changes

We have decided not to make the wholesale changes as described in the previous post concerning SpamAssassin and your default address. This decision was made because the servers have been responding much better ever since a lot of you changed your default address to discard messages. This has helped immensely and we appreciate everyone’s attention to this.

We are still at about 82% compliance in regards to accounts having their default address set to discard messages. Unfortunately, I don’t have any numbers before we started sending out these notices so I do not know how much of an increase this has been. I know that I don’t need numbers to see the remarkable increase in server performance since this change.

When we first started this project, I was thinking about 90% compliance would be a reasonable goal to shoot for. Obviously 90% was not needed to reach the goal we were looking for in terms of server performance, but I believe the closer we can get to 90% the increase in server performance will be just that much more dramatic.

An idea that I am tossing around right now, is to target those server that are below this 82% compliance and send out notices to those servers. The 82% is coming from the grand total of all of our servers. This means some servers are over this percentage and some are under. If we can get those servers that are under 82% compliance up to around 82% then this will help us to achieve our goal of 90% compliance. Another batch of reminders to those affected servers may be issued later this week.

I should quickly point out that we may be handling the SpamAssassin changes that were detailed previously on a case-by-case basis.  If we notice that SpamAssassin is eating up a significant portion of resources on your account and you have your default address set to deliver mail, we may have to disable SpamAssassin on your account.  This is something that we have to reserve the right to do as we try to keep the servers performing at an optimal level.

All-in-all I am extremely happy with the way this project went. I appreciate everyone’s willingness to make adjustments on their end to help the overall health of the servers.

Scott