Recently in spam filtering Category

Today we can announce that Qmail (email) users on every subscription will have their own service user.

Wow you say that's brilliant?

Or maybe you might ask "What is a service user?".

Well simply put, you can login to https://cp.blacknight.com with your e-mail address and password and change your password.

This feature has been requested literally 1000s of times and it allows end users to maintain their own passwords and not have to bother their IT person.

As we've said in the past, we really do listen to people's feedback!

The email service we offer on all our new shared hosting plans is really cool - yes we are biased!

All users get access to a really nice webmail system (ATMail) and combined with basic email filtering for both viruses and spam it's a really winning combination. (Signup for an annual hosting account you get free advertising too!)

If you're using Plesk on a VPS or dedicated server you may want to configure email filtering.

There are two ways to block spam from reaching you on a Plesk server:

• Spam Assassin
• DNS Blacklists

DNS Blacklists can be very helpful, but bear in mind that you need to check what a blacklist is doing (ie. its criteria) before you implement it. You should also keep an eye out for updates and changes, or you can end up facing issues that affected some people earlier this year.
With a blacklist you can decide to simply drop ALL email from certain places.. This may seem like an extreme measure to take, but if you are constantly being spammed then it may help a lot.

SpamAssassin, however, offers you more options. You can choose how you want to handle emails and set scores etc., which gives you and your users a greater level of control.

Setting up both options is quite easy to do with the "Plesk updater", which also handled installing extra modules.

Login to your Plesk powered server or VPS. You should see a screen a bit like this one:
Click on the "Server" link (highlighted in the screenshot above).
That will take you to a screen like this one:
As you can see the "Spam Filter" option is greyed out, as are a few other things. This is because they are not installed.
To install them click on the "Updater" icon and then on the Plesk link.
You'll then be presented with a screen showing you which tools and modules are installed and which ones aren't. If you've already been "playing around" you may have already installed some of these optional modules. In my case the VPS I'm using is a fresh install, so none of the extras have been either installed or configured:
Choose the modules you want to install by clicking in the boxes on the left hand side and then clicking the install link at the top of the screen. You'll then be taken to a confirmation screen where you can also select which email addres should be sent a notification about the install.
The install can take several minutes, so it's a good time to go and grab a coffee.

If you now go back into the server section you should see that the Spam Assassin ninja is no longer greyed out and so Spam Assassin is now installed:
You can now click on the Ninja icon to setup your SpamAssassin settings for your server or VPS.

So what about the blacklist we mentioned earlier?
It can be configured via the "Mail" icon, which also offers you a bunch of other email settings including checking for SPF records and Domain Keys.

If you have a look at the screenshot below I've highlighted 3 of the settings that can be of interest, namely:

• setting email size limits (if you want to block emails based on size)
• SPF settings
• DNS Blackhole (blacklist) settings

SPF and DomainKeys can help with phishing (both against you / your domains and targetting your users). In terms or DNS blacklists I'd always recommend using Spamhaus' lists as they seem to be sanely managed. You can find more information on the Spamhaus site, but I'd recommend using sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org
DO NOT use Spamcop for blocking email. Seriously. Don't.

If you have any issues with setting up email filtering in Plesk that I haven't covered please let us know in the comments.

As I've mentioned a few times in the past few weeks and months, we're in the process of switching over from blacknight.ie to blacknight.com.

I switched this blog over to the .com a couple of weeks ago and didn't think anymore about it until just now.

Normally I check the comment spam filter every couple of days to see if any legitimate comments have been blocked and end up dumping several thousand junk comments.

For the last few days it's been completely empty!

I don't know if it's a coincidence or not, but I suspect that the spammers are confused by the redirects or something... I guess they'll find the new location for the comment form fairly soon, but if they don't I won't complain!

Of course I might have just broken the blog comments ... If you can't post a comment please let me know (michele@blacknight.com)!

As it's a Friday evening I thought I'd have a quick look at the spam filtering stats to see what's been going on.

I haven't looked at ALL the figures yet, but just to give you a flavour of what's going on...

One of our filtering nodes was sent 372,460 emails yesterday. It rejected 88% of those mails!!
Of the 30 thousand plus emails that it filtered nearly 30% was marked as spam.

Can you imagine that amount of junk hitting your office mail server on a dsl line?

I'd rather not!