Knowledgebase

Combatting Spam Email

What is Spam?

The term Spam is believed to originated from a 1970's Monty Python's Flying Circus sketch where everything on the restaurant menu contained SPAM which is a canned luncheon meat.. The product SPAM gained a reputation for being disliked and not wanted, and as the internet evolved the word Spam started to get used in connection with Unsolicited Commercial Email (often shortened to UCE), because unsolicited email is a generally disliked and unwanted product.

Why do I get Spam?
Just like we all get unsolicited advertising literature pushed through the letterbox in the front door, anyone with an email address will sooner or later get some email spam, how much you get very much depends on how freely you have given your email address away.. Yes we are all guilty of doing that! A website asks you for an email address in return for free membership, or some other attractive freebie, and before we think, we've just given our email to a complete stranger. Publishing an email address on a website is guaranteed to eventually get you shed-loads of it, and is a massive no-no! If you must have one published then make sure it something generic like website@yourdomain rather than your primary email address, then either create a specific mailbox for that email or set up a forwarder for website@yourdomain to yourmainemail@yourdomain 

How can I get the freebie, but not give my main email address away?
Use email forwarders! - Create a 'throwaway' email address as a forwarder, say something like xyz123@yourdomain.com (forwarded to your main email address), and use that when signing up on an unknown website or giving away your email address online. Most honourable web sites will respect your privacy but you do have to read their terms and conditions which in some cases enrol you (and your email address) into receiving email from their 'Partner Advertisers' or similar wording which amounts to them sharing your email address with other businesses who will email you with their newsletters or other advertising literature. Less honourable sites are likely to distribute your email address to a spam vendors database, you never know who will do what when you first sign up, so err on the 'safe' side'. If you do start getting a lot of junk addressed to xyz123@yourdomain.com then you can delete that forwarder, and create another one.. Stopping spam dead in it's tracks!

Use forwarders to identify the culprits
Get pro-active! Ideally create an email forwarder that relates to the website you are about to give the email address to, example.. If you are signing up or giving your email address to Itunes then create a forwarder for itunes@yourdomain.com - If you start to get spammed on that address, then you know who the culprit was that leaked, gave away (or sold) that email address to the spammers.

If you get a lot of spam coming into a particular forwarder, then delete the forwarder and create a new one.

Blind Spam
Spammers also send email 'blindly' to common names like mike, john, david, sales, info, enquiries @somedomainorother.com in the hope of it getting through, there's very little we can do about that except use anti-spam filtering in to weed out the dross, or not use 'common' names for email addresses.

The First Line of Defence
Our email system has a powerful anti-spam system that initially references the senders IP address against Real Time Blacklists such as Spamhause and Spam Cop, and if the senders email or IP is listed, the system will immediately delete that inbound email.. The system also uses a temporary internal database with IP addresses of temporarily compromised websites, computers, and servers, where volumes of outgoing spam email has been detected.. A temporary IP block will expire after around 7 days, and the IP is no longer barred from sending email into our system, so 'normal' email flow is restored, but if inbound spam is detected from that location again, the IP is blocked again... Multiple temporary blocks will result ultimately result in a permanent block and that particular IP will be barred forever.

Active Spam Filtering

Also Read