"The day is ours, the bloody dog is dead." -- Mr. Shakespeare
In what can only be described as a tacit admission of utter and complete failure, NMCI administrators have disabled the tagging of spam in association with the "word lists" method described elsewhere in these pages.
You heard it here first. We told you it wouldn't work.
Not only did it not work to defeat spam, it caused horrendous disruption for thousands of Navy and Marine Corps users. Rampant false positives left a user's mailbox littered with erroneous warnings about "Sexual content", "profanity" and "Proprietary content".
The warnings were changed cosmetically early on in the debacle to include the words "May contain..." which was apparently done in an effort to make users feel better about false positives and the associated ineffective treatment of spam. Another cosmetic change was made from "sexual content" to "unauthorized content". This was not only completely useless, but was most likely technically incorrect for places like Naval hospitals where legitimate e-mails probably contain words that are both sexual in content and authorized.
One official from the East coast instructed managers to tell complaining users that, "...this is the solution to SPAM and unwanted e-mail users have been asking for." Really? We would be interested to see the requests to use such an ill-conceived method to address the spam issue.
The erroneous tagging was more than just annoying for the primary recipients. The tags, adulterating both the body of the E-mail and the subject line, had to be scrubbed before the message could be forwarded or replied to. Wasting the Government's time and resources once again, thank you NMCI.
No white-listing or "intelligent" source analysis was done on the E-mails. Simply confirming the message source (through IP address, not sender fields) as .mil or .gov addresses could have easily abated some of the mess and probably reduced loading on the systems parsing thousands of messages a day. Of course there never was any facility for the users to do custom white-lists of their own.
User's quarantined messages were to be deleted in seven days, regardless of activity from the intended recipient. So if a user was on TDY, vacation or away from an NMCI seat for more than seven days his E-mail would begin to be permanently purged having never seen the light of day. There was no provision for the user to extend this time period or disable the "feature" of quarantine all together.
We are still completely baffled why IronPort would cast its shadow on such an idiotic undertaking. SpamCop.net, Bonded Sender Program, Senderbase.org and C-Series Appliances all speak to IronPorts ability to provide very effective spam handling. What were they thinking?
