Combating Spam - What is your email / web hosting provider doing?
Has anyone noticed that they’re getting more spam recently? Especially bank phishing emails or individuals offering to transfer you millions of dollars. It’s really getting on my nerves!
As a company that provides email hosting, we’re doing all we can to combat spam at the moment, our mail server scans every mail and uses http://spamhaus.org to see if the mail is spam, generates statistics on the words used using bayesian alalysis to generate a points score of spaminess and also compares spam signatures with a database of known spam. Everything is virus checked too. Stats currently show that 73% of mail sent to our mail server is either blocked or discarded as it’s spam. When you include what I manually delete from my own mailbox, I’d have to (anecdotally) conclude that 90% + of all email is spam. It’s very annoying. Therefore I know it must be annoying everyone else! What can we do?
Some of our customers use their own mail servers and buy anti-spam services from companies like Message Labs, a leading anti-virus / anit-spam outfit. In trying to solve an unrelated mail issue yesterday for one client, they told me that Message Labs hadn’t identified a single piece of mail as spam that came via our server in over 14,000 emails received. From that point of view, I’m quite pleased with the performance of our mail server and the anti-spam software we use, mailscanner, spam assasin and clamav (this latter software is really virus scanning), in conjunction with the http://spamhaus.org real-time block list.
There’s no room for complacency though, we’re always looking for new ways to stop spam coming through! If anyone has any suggestions that can run on unix servers, please leave a comment.
One thing that definitely will help is that you can change your email address. Whilst I know this is annoying because you have to inform everyone, it will mean you won’t get spam. HOWEVER, READ OUR ANTI-SPAM PAGE for tips so the spam menace doesn’t creep up on you again.
http://www.axonbirch.com/hosting/antispam.html
Also, try the article the above page is based on
http://www.cdt.org/speech/spam/030319spamreport.shtml
It’s an old article but it’s still just as relevant today.