The University of Texas at Austin only served (serves?) about 50k students and about 20k faculty and staff. I used to help run their mail system. Our key tool

The University of Texas at Austin only served (serves?) about 50k students and about 20k faculty and staff. I used to help run their mail system. Our key tool that made the world of difference to us was the Ironport anti-spam appliances that we had sitting in front of the real mail servers. We sometimes got onto black lists, but we had good personal reputations with the big mail service providers, and were able to get quickly de-listed. It helped that I was the former Sr. Internet Mail Administrator at AOL, and I was friends with the principal SRE at the time for Gmail, etc…. But without those Ironport appliances running a highly customized configuration, we would have been dead in the water. Fortunately, we also had a really good working relationship with Ironport. So, we were able to do that job quite well across the entire University with about 1.5 guys — Don Nash was the primary mail administrator for UT Austin, and I stepped in to assist as necessary. But these days, I don’t think that would be enough. I think there are too many cowboys out there who just don’t care how much damage they do, or they actively enjoy doing as much damage as they possibly can.