The 03.09.06 at 19:41, Philipp Thomas wrote:
a) because it's a ratio of about 1 serious feedback mail per 100-200 spam mails. These include the useless "virus detected" and similar mails.
I thought that would be one reason; perhaps you mentioned it time ago.
And before you ask, we *did* use spamassassin otherwise it would have been more like 1000 / 1. But we couldn't filter as hard as we liked, because that would have possibly rejected valid mail. So those from the feedback team first had to weed out all the junk before starting serious work. These are hours spent for nothing which isn't very cost effective.
Ok, I understand that. I'll give you some ideas: acceptance of the email could be tied, for example, to the email having a pgp signature, a valid client number, o a registration number of some sort. Only email passing this filter would be automatically forwarded. I think you already have some automated filters of that sort for the support email address.
b) Many feedback mail lack basic information needed to work on it (like the Version of SuSE Linux etc.). So the first mail to the customer has to ask for that info. Again this is much time spent for nothing.
Ok, another idea, then. There could be a local program that generates forms for feed back, even a plain text form to be filled. I think I saw such a thing in kde, but I'm using gnome. I think there is an application in gnome and/or kde that automatically generates a bug report when something crashes, that has to be filled, ant it generates an email. Couldn't something like that be done? As part of yast and/or a separate app? It could automatically take registration data, and system info like versions.
Web and email ran in parallel for a long time, but lately the amount of junk that came in via mail just got so much in comparison to the real feedback mails that we simply had to switch off the mail address.
I can imagine... I'm receiving my part of them, just because I participate in this list. You have seen perhaps my comment on that, how to block .pif in postfix and such... In your case, it must be much worse. There has been comment on an antispam measure that consists on auto responding to the "from" address, requesting and answer within a time frame. If he responds, he is added to a white list, and the original email goes on. I don't know how client/users would react to it, however.
2) Perhaps some other listers think like me and will complain as well - in the web form, of course.
Feel free to do so :) Chances are high that you'll (more or less) get the same answer as you do now.
Well... I'd like SuSE to accept email, even if they request a registration number and/or pgp signature and/or challenge/response email. Better than nothing. And I appreciate your previous comments on this :-) -- Cheers, Carlos Robinson