Re: Plusnet - praise where it's due

On Thu, 28 Jun 2007 14:28:07 +0100, PlusNet Support Team
<support@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

Mortimer wrote:
"PlusNet Support Team" <support@xxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:468382ec$0$8752$ed2619ec@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Mortimer wrote:
"PlusNet Support Team" <support@xxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:4683775b$0$8721$ed2619ec@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Alfredo wrote:
Is there a way of training your spam filter? Maybe by getting customers
to forward spam which has not been trapped to a "this is spam" email
address so the filter gets refined.
Yes, that's possible. Have a look here:-
http://www.plus.net/support/security/spam/spam_protection_guide.shtml?supportb=security_t5spam#5

Excellent. I tend to use Mailwasher to delete any received spam that has got
through the filter, but I might start forwarding it. Is the address specific
to PlusNet or will it also work for Force 9?

You use the PlusNet address regardless of the VISP you are on so no it's
not specific to PlusNet:-

http://www.f9.net.uk/support/security/spam/spam_protection_guide.shtml?supportb=security_t5spam#5

When you say about "forward[ing] inline with the full email headers", does
that mean that for Outlook Express I need to view the message source and
paste that into a new message to spam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx? I'd have
thought that forwarding as an attachment would work equally well because the
headers would preserved that way as well - wouldn't they?

Yes, but DSpam doesn't handle emails that are in this format
particularly well.

It's a bit cumbersome at the moment but we're working on a SquirrelMail
plugin that will give you a 'Spam' and 'Not Spam' button in webmail that
will do all the hard work for you.

Now that sounds really good. Anything that can refine the spam filtering has
got to be a good thing.

It should solve the problems encountered with forwarding using OE.

Where they could possibly improve is in the early reporting of faults:
quite a few times I've encountered a problem, found that the status is
still green and yet when I raise a ticket I get a response "yes, we know
about this" or "we'll flag it as an issue when we know the scale of the
problem", rather than flagging it *first* to forestall support calls and
tickets and then providing timescale info as it becomes available.
Agreed, and we'd like to do this. There's a couple of deterrants, one of
which is the somewhat lacking Service Status tool that takes a while to
propogate and is a bit cumbersome to use. There's been a new on in
development for a while but it's been in the making for some months now as
it's not high priority. There's a prototype linked from the following blog
post:-
http://community.plus.net/webportal/2007/03/06/new-service-status-tool/

As far as it's possible to tell from the mock-up, this looks good.

If I'm honest, we'd be flagging a *lot* of problems via Service Status if
we opened a thread each time we saw one or two single user issues with
customers' accounts. We need to be careful not to dilute the feed.

Good point. I suppose you could in theory do some fancy network traffic
monitoring, looking for incoming traffic from customers *to your own
servers* and matching against the corresponding response: if there's no
response within a stated time, that may indicate that the server has failed.

We've got quite extensive internal monitoring. Most of which is based
around NAGIOS (http://www.nagios.org/). We also graph most of our
servers/services too. Some can be seen on the portal:-

http://www.f9.net.uk/support/network_performance/index.shtml

Going off at a tangent slightly, I think you need to look at the Help and
Support pages and make a clearer distinction between "how do I configure
things" which can be handled by stages of FAQs and "I think you've got
server problems" which need to bypass FAQs and get straight to raising a
ticket with as little faffing about as possible.

True, but in any help-desk environment most of the 'server problem'
reports would actually end up being the result of end user
misconfiguration or some other local issue. I know that sounds like a
bit of a glib generalisation but generally speaking it is true.

The option to raise a ticket is only 4 clicks away from our home page
which I don't think is too bad.

For email, you might also sub-divide into "customer cannot contact POP/IMAP
server" and "customer can contact POP/IMAP server but no new email is
arriving into mailbox from the outside world" in your reports. Likewise for
Usenet.

Now there's an idea I like! We have a broadband fault troubleshooter for
ADSL faults, but nothing quite as specific for email, ftp or any of our
other services. It would be great if we could implement similar tools
for those.

You mentioned about SquirrelMail. What are the long-term plans for webmail?
Will you continue to use SquirrelMail or will you be replacing it with
something else? If you change to something else, make sure it matches SM for
speed and usability (eg ability to tag all messages for deletion in one go).

I'm not sure on the long-term plans for Webmail at the moment. Rest
assured though we wouldn't want to take any features away that you've
grown accustomed to.

For me, the only two improvements that you could make to SquirrelMail are:

1) Display time as well as date on the one-line-per-message view of a
mailbox.

Couldn't see what you meant by this at first as both the time and date
are shown. Then I realised that only recent messages appear to be
displayed like this whilst older ones just have the day and year.

2) Allow entries in the address book to be imported from an OutlookExpress
.wab file or else from .vcf files for each contact, so it's not necessary to
retype from your own address book to SquirrelMail's.

Good idea. I wonder if there are any plugins that would help achieve
either of these two things?

http://www.squirrelmail.org/plugins.php


Fascinating to see a multi-million pound corp try to bull*** it's way
out of trouble using a FREE email service, because it cant be arsed to
do the job properly itself!

http://www.squirrelmail.org/wiki/SquirrelMailGPL

Unbelievable, but hardly the first time Plus have play free and easy
with customer data!

See

http://tinyurl.com/yoynh8
.