Increase in SPAM received

[OasisWC]

A lot of our new clients complain of receiving a huge increase in SPAM as soon as they switch to our (Jaguar) servers. Besides enabling SpamAssassin is there any other steps to comnbatting this problem?

[Awalsh]

take a look at http://www.spamhaus.org, this looks interesting (Database of spam IP's that can be looked up by exim etc).... im sure ive seen a guide on how to get it working somewhere.

Oh and another thing you could setup a boxtrapper (easy if you got whm/cpanel installed) so anyone who sends you an email has to validate by replying before the email is delivered to the inbox, oh and you can do blacklists, whitelists etc

[the_ancient]

Few Tips

1> Dont use a "Catch All" Box. Alot of spammer drill down on Whois Records for valid domains and just send "ANYTHING@domain.com"
Set the defualt settings to "bounce" or "fail" or my fav "blackhole" (carefule with blackhole, I would avoid using if it is a business site, Blackhole sends the mail to "a black hole" so the sender is not notified the mail failed

This could also be the reason for the compaints, Jag I think defualts to the main pop3 account on signup, alot of hosts defualt to fail or have catch all disabled.



2> Try to avoid common address's like "admin" "sales" "webmaster" etc. These are known to spammers and tried

3> Avoid Pubishing Email address's in plain text, use Images, Javascript or Web Forms to obsure the real address

I will probally think of more later #1 is the biggest though

[JPC-Greg]

If you see an increase in spam when moving to us its probably becuase we do not do any pre-filtering using sbl's and their old server probably did. For instance its normal for many small businesses and personal sites to use an sbl , even our jaguar mail server could/should use one. We havent put anything like that in place yet in our shared servers becuase we didnt want to risk even one missed email for our clients from an sbl list that is refusing to remove someones listing , it happens. So we leave the filtering to you and try to give you tools to accomplish that.

We are of course always open to user comments and suggestions and will adapt and implement what is being requested or demanded.

[Jaded]

How about? Setup a catchall with a very small quota? (Just thought of that lol).

I set the catchall to fail but I like my new idea better....

[jason]

Haven't checked the SpamAssassin rules in a while, but last ime I did, I believe that they checked against SpamHaus' database. Of course SA won't delete a message if it is on that blacklist, but it will flag the message with a high point value if it is.

--Jason

[OasisWC]

Is BoxTrapper available with cPanel? Does Jaguar offer this? If not, where can we get this?

[twcinpa]

Did you find the guide? I'm curious how you felt SpamHaus worked if you did.

Regards,

Tom

[Bellthorpe]

A lot of our new clients complain of receiving a huge increase in SPAM as soon as they switch to our (Jaguar) servers. Besides enabling SpamAssassin is there any other steps to comnbatting this problem?

I've just moved a couple of domains here, and I'm very appreciative that the amount of spam has increased.

Before you ask what I'm smoking, let me explain. The sites were at mywebhosting.com (formerly softcomca.com) in Canada. This was one of those truly evil companies that took it upon itself to use RBL lists to block emails. Without telling the recipient!. I first became aware of this when mailing lists would bounce me. Then I became aware that email from friends and customers was sometimes not getting through. When I complained to softcomca, their response was always 'spam is bad, you should be pleased we're doing something about it, you ungrateful wretch'. Or 'take it up with the sender of the email, it's their fault they're on the RBL'. Right, yahoo will jump when I send them a note!

Enough is enough. I now have no accounts with those purveyors of evil. Now that my accounts are here, I'm seeing more spam, but I can take my own measures, with SpamAssassin, or in some cases, just Thunderbird's filtering.

Oh, what am I smoking? ATM, a post-prandial Montecristo #3.