Yes, we removed a feature, and since that's something we don't often do, I thought I should explain why we decided to do this.
When we launched our service, our quarantine notifications contained links to recover and to whitelist email senders. There was no option to blacklist a sender - our thinking at the time was "the message has already been identified as spam, why would you need to blacklist the sender?"
But we received a few requests to add a blacklist entry, and, since it was a trivial feature to add, we did so, not anticipating that there would be any real downside to the feature.
But we were wrong. It's led to important emails from valid users being blocked, and this isn't acceptable to us.
How could this happen?
A large proportion of spam and malware has forged senders. Malware on someones computer might send spam or malware to everybody in your address book, using the infected person's email address. Perhaps it's your own email address in there, or one of a co-worker or a family member.
We are the best in the business at blocking that spam and malware, and it ends up in our user's quarantine. But then, if they blacklist the sender, they end up blacklisting the email address of someone important to them.
And that's the trouble.
Indeed, we've found that we have users who blacklist pretty much everything they see in the quarantine. And now some have more than 30,000 entries in their blacklists. Imagine the rate of false-positives they can have as a result!
We've found that blacklisting the addresses in the quarantine does virtually nothing to improve the spam capture rate, and it causes false-positives. Lot's of false positives. And while we love to block spam, we really hate to block legitimate email, even if it's because of a poorly chosen blacklist entry.
So that feature has got to go.
I hope that this explanation makes sense to everybody.
Tom Johnson
Founder/CEO
Comments
6 comments
I was looking at my quarantine blacklist in mailroute and it is still there. I was writing a long comment here only to realize blacklist is only removed from notifications, not from the system.
Yes, it is ok to remove from notifications. Blacklist still being available is awesome. A note on the post like "blacklist is still available from our web interface if you really need to get rid of some sender manually" would save me a lot of time debugging and understanding.
I have experienced an immediate uptick in SPAM getting through. Please do not remove the blacklist.
Jhg I think you fell for the same thing as I did (see my comment above). Blacklist is there. Never removed. They removed the link to blacklist from the notification emails. If you login to the admin interface you'll see all your blacklist working exactly as it should.
I strongly disagree with this decision. It should at least still be available in the domain quarantine.
It may be true that "We've found that blacklisting the addresses in the quarantine does virtually nothing to improve the spam capture rate, and it causes false-positives."
But I don't care about the capture rate, that's your job. I care about preventing legitimate looking or obnoxious marketing email from getting through and blacklisting from the domain quarantine was the simplest way to do that.
As for false positives, I feels thats on me to figure out.
I never thought I'd have to explore an alternative to MailRoute (if such a thing exists) but now I guess I must.
I also strongly disagree with this decision. I now have so much junk email to sort through to find one or two emails I need to release. The process to blacklist is now too cumbersome and involves extra time and clicking.
So now I need to open the email, copy the domain I want to blacklist or whitelist (because you have also removed the option to whitelist an entire domain), close the email, click on the whitelist/blacklist option, paste the domain, go back to the quarantine to release the email and continue to repeat this process for over 100 emails??????? Are you serious?
Please reinstate this for the domain admin or we shall also need to find an alternative spam filter.
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