Sep 04 2008
How To Filter Out Spams?
Are you receiving any unsolicited rubbish emails everyday? Unfortunately, receiving spams is a common problem nowadays faced by Internet users. As long as your email address is made public, there is a risk that it may fall into the bad hands of spammers.
So how to avoid or reduce spams getting into your mailbox? First things first, be careful to expose your email address, especially online. For example, when you need to give your email address to someone or enter it on a web site, first make sure who you are dealing with. Always check out the web site’s privacy policy to see how the other party will handle your personal information. If in doubt, do not proceed.
If you publish your email address on your web site, please be sure to protect it so that automated programs used by spammers called spambots, which crawl around the Internet looking for possible email addresses, will not be able to find yours.
You can do this by using an image instead of plain text to display email address, or JavaScript to jumble your email address into something readable by human but unreadable by program. Please consult your web designer on how to do this. Strongly recommended.
Another good idea is to use a separate email address online, such as subscribing to a newsletter online. I know some people use different email addresses when dealing with different web sites. If any of their email addresses get spammed, they will know which web site has mishandled their email address!
Your hosting provider should also provide antispam protection. For BizPartner customers, you can login to your email control panel (mailadmin) or cPanel to set up your antispam features. You can even “teach” the server which is spam and which is not so that it can better deal with spams in future. Let me know if you need to know how.
There is also a notorious way of spamming by forging a bogus email address based on known domain names on the Internet. If you find your domain name appear in the spammers email address, then you have fallen victim to such spams.
One good way to counter this is to turn on Sender Policy Framework (SPF). When an SPF-enabled mail server receives emails appear to be from your domain name, it checks with your mail server to verify whether that email address exists or not. If it does not, it will not be delivered to the recipients. Please check with your hosting provider on SPF. BizPartner customers are already protected by SPF.
As an added protection, you can also use the filtering features in your email software such as Microsoft Outlook to filter out unwanted emails.
These are just among many ways to fight spams. Please let me know if you need any clarification or help. If you have any good ideas on how to combat spams, please let me know in comments.
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For BizPartner customers, here’s how you set up the antispam:
cPanel hosting:
1. Login to your cPanel (http://www.yourdomain.com/cpanel)
2. Click Account Level Filtering to set up filters for all users.
3. Click “Create a new Filter” and set up your email filters from there.
For cPanel hosting, antispam software SpamAssassin has already been installed on server. All possible spams are marked with ***Spam*** in the subject title. All you need to do is to create a folder called “Spam” in your email software (eg. Outlook) and email filtering rule to move all incoming emails containing ***Spam*** to this folder.
Non-cPanel hosting:
1. Login to your MailAdmin ((http://mailadmin.yourdomain.com) with your admin account.
2. Click Users, then Spam.
3. Set up the filters from there. Recommended “Hold when rating is 7+”.
For non-cPanel hosting, you can also “teach” the server what is spam and what is not. In MailAdmin, click ASpam Training, copy and paste the spam email header and content into the box, select “This is spam”, and click Train Filter.
Please contact us if you need any help.
Gmail has a very strong email filtering.
The way i am using is, let the mail delivery to gmail account, either
1) setup google apps (let gmail manage ur emails in the domain),
2) create a gmail account, then setup external account (POP ) to read all ur emails into gmail from time to time.
gmail will do very good filtering for you.
then you can read your email in gmail, or
you also can download all emails using ur email clients such as Outlook. (Gmail is the only free webmail that give POP/IMAP access, i think).
Halo, after i change hosting provider i never receive SPAM mail anymore.. do u know this kind of technology??!!
Yes Mimi. It is possible. Maybe your hosting provider is using a certain new way or server software to fight spams. I don’t know what technology it is. But if Gmail and Cloudmark can filter out more than 90% of spams, why not? If possible, please check with your provider and share here for the benefit of other readers.
Hi Mimi, I found that you maybe from a hosting company based in the northern part of Penang island, are you not? Can you tell us how your company fight spams, that your customers don’t receive spams any more? Feel free to share.
Hi Ricky, i am just a end user. by the way u are so pro that how u know my hosting provider is from penang island??i heard they say is call Greylisting. u know it?
Hi Mimi, I looked at the web server traffic and found you came from a hosting provider’s system, and you had been browsing on mainly hosting-related pages on my blog, that’s why I thought you are from that company.
I heard of the name Greylisting before, but not sure how it works. Is it something like blacklisting or whitelisting? How do you find it as an end user? Please share with us anything on this topic or your hosting provider that may benefit us. Thanks.