For the past several weeks we have been trying to impact the amount of “spam” (junk email) received by our web hosting clients. Testing of a dozen control-group mail boxes that have been around for as little as just three years to a maximum of ten years, and openly published on the web multiple times, were susceptible to getting up to 500 spam emails per day! Obviously you didn’t get to enjoy that kind of volume, we made sure of it, but it was there, flowing like water. To make sure you don’t see that kind of volume in the future — and to further reduce what you do get now — we made some upgrades and we then tested and tweaked settings until the volume of those once-open control-group mailboxes were reduced from 500 emails to about ten. A significant reduction, all without blocking legitimate correspondents’ emails. Here are a few more details.
Our Apache mail server has always employed an application called SpamAssassin. It’s what puts that [SPAM] on the subject line of suspect messages. That was valuable so you could apply some simple message rules. Well, we recently upgraded this software. The results were positive and immediate. We reduced the count from 500 to about 100. That was a moment of happiness, no doubt, but we were on a roll, we wanted to reduce further. We did. Between blocking certain telling character sets, certain routing gimmicks noted in emails headers, and by setting the SpamAssassin action to block from mails ranked 5 to 99.
Current testing, as noted, has gotten the count down to about ten emails per day. We could drill further, but we don’t want to risk blocking our legitimate correspondents’ emails. If you were getting too many emails and noticed that for the past few weeks the volume seemed to drop away precipitously, it wasn’t so much the spammers decided to give you a break for the holidays, it was us.
We wish you a safe, joyous, and spam-free holiday season.