How to control the ever-increasing flood
Spam is the most consistent annoyance online. On our server, we are literally updating spam definitions every few days to help keep our client's spam levels as low as possible.
When there were only .coms, .nets and .orgs to deal with it was bad enough, but over recent years there have been hundreds of other domains added, a great number of which are only used for spam. For example, I have never seen a legitimate email from a domain ending in .click, or .bid or .science, to name just a few. The good thing is that because these are only used for spam, you can block them pretty easily if your server allows access to something called "Spamassassin." Spamassassin is like a mail firewall. You can block emails by domain, subject line and even by particular attachments.
If you, or your
web designer, have access to this on your web server, all you need to do
is to look at the incoming email address of your spam.
Our server blocks thousands
of spam emails a day from each
of our client's mailboxes.
of spam emails a day from each
of our client's mailboxes.
If you get a lot of spam coming from, say, someone@somedomain.review,
you just need to go into Spamassassin and blacklist *@*.review. Any
future spam from any .review email address will be immediately deleted.
At the time of writing this, we have about 950 such domains blocked from
our server. As well as the new domains, you can also block other
country domains. For example, we used to receive a lot of spam and
hacking attempts from foreign countries like Indonesia, Pakistan, Syria
and Russia.
When it comes to .coms, .net and .orgs, where spam is mixed in with
legitimate email, you can also use Spamassassin to block by subject,
like "online pharmaceuticals."
Yet another option is to set a spam-bar. This means that Spamassassin looks over the email and assigns scores based on several factors, like:
Yet another option is to set a spam-bar. This means that Spamassassin looks over the email and assigns scores based on several factors, like:
• Does it mention lots of money?
• Does it contain a lot of links?
• Is it in HTML? It could contain bad coding.
• Is it in all capitals?
• Does the domain really exist, or is the email being forged from somewhere else?
These points are tallied up, and you can tell the software to delete
any emails above, say, 10 points. Using all of these methods can really
keep your spam to a manageable level. Our server blocks thousands of
spam emails a day from each of our client's mailboxes.
Terry Young is the founder and CEO of Internet Marketing and Design. Since 1997,
his computer programming and graphic design knowledge have kept his company
at the forefront of the latest technology in web development.
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