We Hear You (Part 2)

To continue from my blog post from last week, another pain point has been the inability of a thread to stay whitelisted. If you’ve brought this issue to us in the past you’re familiar with the explanation. The way our technology works is we insert a hashed message thread ID into all outbound messages, and if we find a match upon return it passes whitelisted. This worked well for a long time. Against technology is our best friend and our worst enemy. The increased adoption of “privacy” appliances and application” and Exchange header size limits basically made this solution inconsistent.

Exchange has a header size limit that can be adjusted, this setting basically starts stripping non-essential (non exchange header inserts) items, so what we found is after a few replies to a thread, our keys would get pushed out. As far as privacy appliances go, they basically clean headers every time so those would fail a lot faster and quickly.

We had to pull out the big guns and pull Vlad out of code retirement for this one. The new whitelisting engine works similar to a standard address based whitelist that doesn’t relay on an element we can’t control (headers). We’re still working on it but the bulk of it is live and you really should see a decrease in complaints from there as well.

Next week, we’ll look at spam engine rewrites that will knock your socks off! Well unless you’re the guy that thinks getting 2 pieces of SPAM that you signed up for or whitelisted in day means getting SLAMMED!

Carlos Lascano
VP Support Services, ExchangeDefender
carlos@ownwebnow.com
(877) 546-0316 x737