Email Policy
The MTA on zlatkovic.com is surely the domain's busiest server. According to
our logs and user reports, more than 90% of mail-related traffic is consumed
by unsolicited bulk email and malware.
Over time, I grew quite unhappy with this situation.
To change things, few measures were undertaken to stop these unsolicited
messages.
Unfortunately, as a side-effect, a few solicited messages fail to reach
their destination every now and then. I am very aware of this and have
decided to live with it, rather than to receive unsolicited ones.
If you have tried to send a message to someone at this domain and failed,
here are few reasons why, along with a few hints regarding what you can do
about it.
Mail delivery on zlatkovic.com goes through the following three filtering
steps:
Step 1:
During the SMTP session with our MTA, the IP address of the peer is searched
for in a list of bad peers.
If found, the message is not accepted, whereever its origin, whatever its
content.
Note:
If your message fails to pass this test, you will likely receive a notice from
your site's mailing software. If you receive a report about failed delivery
which says that our MTA didn't accept the message from your MTA's address, then
you can contact the recipient by other means and have him except your MTA's
address from this test.
Step 2:
A general filter scans the message and looks for signs which are
typical for unsolicited bulk mail.
If such signs are found, the message is delivered to /dev/null.
No questions asked, no answers given, no prisoners taken.
Note:
If your message fails to pass this test, it will be deleted.
Neither you nor the recipient will be notified about this.
In this case, your message has few attributes our filter system takes as
typical for spam.
Resending your message in plain-text instead of HTML helps.
Not attaching malware helps as well.
Step 3:
The content of the message is scanned by a bayesian
classifier, using the recipient's individual training data.
If the message is classified as unsolicited, it is delivered to a special
folder instead of recipient's mailbox.
Note:
If your message fails to pass this test, it will probably go unnoticed,
as users check their folder designated for spam close to never. If the
message remains in that folder, the bayesian classifier software will reread
it when it updates its database. This will confirm the message as spam,
making sure that other similar messages fail to pass this test as well.
Watching your language when composing the message will make sure that this
doesn't happen. You probably receive spam as well, you know how it looks like.
If we liked its looks, it would never have started bothering us, so try to
send mail which is totally different to that.
If the message passes all three tests, it will be delivered to recipient's
mailbox. If you are a spammer, congratulations, you have made it through.
If you are an honest peer, please accept my apologies for the inconvenience
these tests might have caused you.
Postmaster,
20. December 2003 | 
