ClearSwift MAILsweeper (was: Idiotic mail filtering)

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From: Earle Martin
Subject: ClearSwift MAILsweeper (was: Idiotic mail filtering)
Date: 23:25 on 30 Oct 2003
On a tangent to my existing hate of ClearSwift MAILsweeper (which a bit of
Googling for the error messages leads me to believe it was that blocked my
dad's mail):

> Scenario: Scenarios/Incoming/Block Profanity: The operation completed 
> successfully.
> 
> Text Analysis Results
> 
> This report describes the search expressions found in this message.
> Scenarios/Incoming/Block Profanity found the following search expressions in
> '0.0.0': 
> 
> * The phrase 'britney spears' was found at the location(s): 4.

What the fuck kind of error message is this? It's almost totally useless to
the user. These things will make no sense to someone like my dad:

* "Scenario" - complete with path to the filter for fuck's sake
* "The operation completed successfully" - what operation? says Dad
* "search expressions" - whats?
* "in '0.0.0'" - huh? 
* "at the location(s): 4." - this is my favourite. It's too dumb to know
  whether to make the word location into a plural, and then it gives you a
  number with no context. 4 what? It can't be locations, because the string 
  only appeared once. And it can't be line 4, because it occurred after
  about ten lines.

So the error message could have read:
- Your mail was rejected because it contained the following words proscribed 
  by our filtering policy: Britney Spears.

It could include an event reference number too, perhaps, which could refer
to a system log. All the rest is totally unnecessary junk.

According to their website:

------
Why choose CS MAILsweeper for SMTP

* The world's #1 for email content security
* Optimizes network performance
* Feature rich and comprehensive
* Provides intuitive e-policy wizards
* Up to 100% increase in performance
* Prevents virus infiltration
* Prohibits denial of service attacks
* Protects intellectual property
* Maintains compliance
------

I think that speaks for itself, don't you?

-- 
Earle Martin
hex on irc.perl.org
http://purl.oclc.org/net/earlemartin/

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