Idea for increasing effectiveness

Idea for increasing effectiveness

I am curious about the legal issues. I personally am not a lawyer, but
when I have taken tutorials at conferences on Internet legal issues, I
have been warned repeatedly about content filtering. SpamAssassin and the
Bayesian filters are content filtering, because they examine the content
of the message itself and filter based on that. This is fine for the end
user to do, but if you do it as an organization, you are potentially
opening yourself up to a big liability. Remember the Prodigy case? The
ruling there was essentially that, since they were doing content filtering,
they were liable for whatever *did* get through. So if you use SpamAssassin
on the organization's mail server, and one of your employees gets a kiddie
porn spam in spite of that and is offended by it, you could be sued.

We have started using IP blacklist filters here. This is safer from the
legal point of view, because the content of the message itself is never
examined. The message is rejected before it is ever sent. Our blacklist
filters have a lot of false negatives, but the problem with false positives
has been nearly nonexistent. Also, I used to get hundreds of bounced spams
every day, and the number has dropped to nearly zero since we started filtering.

I think IP blacklists still have their place.