Spam is an ongoing issue –
not just for you, but for everyone who has an email address. Unfortunately,
much like spyware, there is no “silver bullet” for eliminating spam from
ever getting into your Inbox. Spam doesn’t tend to target servers, but
individual addresses – whether spoofed or valid. There has been plenty of
ink spilled about this topic, but here’s a quick write-up from Microsoft
that does a pretty good job of summing things up:
How do spammers get e-mail
addresses?
Spammers steal, swap, or
buy lists of valid e-mail addresses (and the addresses of people who have
responded to spam command a premium). Spammers also build their own lists
using special software that rapidly generates millions of random e-mail
addresses from well-known providers, such as MSN Hotmail and others, and
then sends messages to these addresses. Invalid e-mail accounts return
e-mail to the sender, so the software very rapidly records which e-mail
addresses are active and which are not.
Some spammers also gather
or harvest addresses from Web sites where people sign up for free offers,
enter contests, and so on. Harvesters may also use programs (known as Web
bots) that trawl for e-mail addresses anywhere they're posted for all to
see—on Internet white pages, job postings, newsgroups, message boards, chat
rooms, and even personal Web pages.
At NexLAN, our mail server
is charged with the task of identifying what is spam and what is not and
dealing with it appropriately. We do not want to delete messages that we
(actually, our server) deems to be spam. It’s standard practice to only
delete messages that are infected
with viruses (which we do), but to pass spam onto the end-user. We don’t
presume to know what is and isn’t spam according to you.
If a grandma doesn’t get an
email from her grandchild, there’ll be some frustration, but it’s not a
critical situation. If a business misses an email containing an order or a
request for information, it’s a much different situation. As we (NexLAN)
deal exclusively with businesses, our spam policies have been crafted to
protect your business processes and be sure that you get all of your
business email.
Flagging messages with
[Spam]
Instead of deleting a
message that is suspected to be spam (as an ISP for home users might do),
our mail server flag any “suspect” messages by adding [Spam] to the subject
line. This way, you, the end-user, can apply folder rules to your incoming
mail to whisk these messages off to a Junk e-mail folder where you can sort
through them later. It’s certainly not 100% accurate and there are indeed
false-positives, but that’s unfortunately all part of the spam “game”.
In Outlook, you can simply
create a “rule” to filter all messages that have subject lines beginning
with “[Spam]” into a separate folder. Detailed instructions can be found on
this page. Be
sure to check that folder periodically for any false positives (i.e. valid
emails marked as spam). If you do find a false positive, you can add that
address to your whitelist.
What’s a whitelist?
A whitelist is a list of
email addresses (or just email domains, like nexlan.com) that you have
specified as being approved senders. We can set this up for you, from our
Merak Mail Server, for your entire domain. With a whitelist, any email that
comes into any user in your domain is checked against the list. If a match
is found, the message bypasses the spam filters and is delivered directly to
the Inbox. By maintaining this at the domain level, you don’t have to worry
about adding duplicate entries for each user’s individual list.
What else can you do?
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Our ISP NewsLine comes
out about once a month and are loaded with tips and tricks to help fight
the war against spam. As we’ve said and you well know, this is not an
isolated problem. Anyone with email is trying to find the solution.
Check out our archives
for previous issues. This
past issue is also a particularly
informative one about spam. If you aren't receiving our NewsLines and
would like to be, please email
newsletter@nexlan.com
to subscribe.
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Definitely create
Rules in Outlook
to move anything with [Spam] in the header to a separate folder.
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Consider signing up for our Challenge Response program. We sent a
letter to all of our existing clients detailing the program and offering
the opportunity to opt-in (view
the PDF here).
In short, any messages that come in to your domain and are suspected to
be spam are kept in a holding queue and not immediately delivered to the
recipient. An email is sent to the suspected spam sender asking them to
click a link to verify that they are in fact a human, valid, sender and
not a spam server. Once the link is clicked, the address is added to
the domain white list and the message is delivered. All future messages
from that person are delivered automatically (as they’ve been added to
the whitelist).
If the link is not clicked within three days, the sender is assumed to
be spam. The message is deleted and the sender is placed on your
blacklist (the opposite of your whitelist).
This is a free service for NexLAN-hosted email, as it is built-in to our
mail server. If you decided to opt-in, I’ll suggest that we fully
populate your domain’s whitelist with email addresses from everyone’s
address books to help minimize the number of valid senders receiving a
challenge response message. If you are an existing NexLAN hosting
client and are interested in signing up (note that it must be the entire
domain, not just select users),
download the PDF form and fax it back
to us.
Ready to switch to NexLAN?
If you'd like to talk about moving your e-mail to
NexLAN, email us at
nexlan@nexlan.com or call 217.431.7236.