Spam not being caught

blaszlo

blaszlo

Verified User
Joined
Jun 9, 2008
Messages
116
Hey guys,

I know that everyone is going to get some spam, but a customer of mine is getting rediculous amounts of spam (hundreds daily) to multiple email accounts attached to their domain, most of them are foreign and can't even be read. I currently have Spamasassin set to delete the spam at a custom threshold of 3.0 and it is doing nothing. This, I think, is a pretty low threshold and I don't want to tag legitimate mail, but I need this spam to stop. It's not out fault that they are getting the spam, but they feel that it is and they are pissed. Is there some other way to block these emails? Below are a couple of the emails that they are getting, all in the same language (Russian??? :) )...

From: Федор [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Monday, August 25, 2008 4:29 PM
To: *******@*****.***
Subject: Заказ сегодня

ПОЧТОВАЯ СЛУЖБА
телефон заказа Интернет рассылок - 8 (985) З63 - Ч6 I 3
Закажите рекламу у нас, и Вы отметите резкий подъём продаж и увеличение числа звонков от будущих клиентов. Мы надеемся на долгосрочное сотрудничество с Вами. Нашим постоянным клиентам предоставляются скидки!

Наша работа - Ваш успех!
Внимание! Наши базы увеличились!
Название
базы
однократная
доставка
двукратная
доставка
трёхкратная
доставка
"Бизнес-Москва"
I,57 миллиона адр.
3000 руб.
4000 р.
5000 py6.
"Москва Юридическая и Частная"
4,67 mln адр.
4000 p.
5500 рублей
7000 р.
"Бизнес Россия + Москва"
3,9I mln адр.
4000 рублей
5500 руб.
7000 py6.
"Юр. и Физ. Лица России и Москвы"
по I2 миллиона адресов*
*всего по России - 29 миллиона адр.
8000 руб.
12500 р.
15000 р.
тел.: 8 (985) 36З - 46 I3

Any help is greatly appreciated! Thanks!
 
What have you done to enable spamblocker (not to be confused with spamassassin)?
 
I haven't done anything to enable it, if it is installed an enabled I don't know about it (I took aver these servers a few months ago)... What do I do to enable it?
 
Okay, it turns out I DO have spamblocker, and am using that abviously in conjuction with spamasassin. I remember actually now with another domain I added them to the use_rbl_domains list and thata helped. I just added the domain in question to that list, we'll see if that helps. Any more suggestions would be great! Thanks,
 
blaszlo said:
Okay, it turns out I DO have spamblocker, and am using that abviously in conjuction with spamasassin. I remember actually now with another domain I added them to the use_rbl_domains list and thata helped. I just added the domain in question to that list, we'll see if that helps. Any more suggestions would be great! Thanks,
Click to expand...

Well, this is an unorthodox way of doing it but it was the only close-to-perfect solution I could find. However, I understand that not everybody will like or even accept it. It might be difficult to switch to it if the customer is using Imap and there are lots of messages on the server already. Anyhow the procedure for, say, Willy is this:

0) You have email account [email protected]
1) Get a Gmail account you remember, say [email protected]
2) Create another account at the client's end, say [email protected]
2) Edit the Gmail settings to forward the email to [email protected] and optionally save the message to Gmail message base
3) Now delete the original [email protected]
5) Create a mail forwarder [email protected] to [email protected]
6) Tell Willy to read his email from [email protected]

Now that somebody sends a mail to Willy the forwarder will send it to Gmail which has a very, very good spam filter. If the mail is not spam it will be forwarded to Willy's nospam address.

The plus point is that the mails are backed up at the Gmail end (7+ gigs at the moment).

I got about 40.000 spams per month (catchall address, you know), tried several methods losing my hair (already gray) and got this tip from a friend. It worked and is still being used by the company I was working for.

The Gmail filter is so good that I would gladly pay for it. We used to have a couple of other alternatives (SpamAssassin and some other) but however we tuned them we both lost important mails and still got garbage mails.

As I said, not everybody may like this way of doing things but I have not yet found a better solution.

Markku
 
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Wow! It's true, this seems a little unorthodox, but a great idea at the same time. The use_rbl_domains list in spamblocker seemed to really solve my problem with this customer, but I will keep this thread in mind in case I ever have a huge spam problem again. Thanks!
 
Love Markku's method. Maybe I should stop developing SpamBlocker and just tell everyone to do it this way ;).

Jeff
 
jlasman said:
Love Markku's method. Maybe I should stop developing SpamBlocker and just tell everyone to do it this way ;).
Click to expand...

Thank you for your kind words :)

Well, there are certain things one must remember, though:

- Can one rely on a kind-of-a free service like Gmail? (well, I do)
- What if Gmail makes a major change of some sort? (nothing in sight, though)
- Security: Can one rely on Gmail security? (well can you trust anything, actually?)
- Complexity: What if the chain breaks mysteriously? (Well, this can happen with other tools as well)
- Customers are unwilling to switch to it (I tell them I have been using it for four years)
- What if you already have a large IMAP message base? (I honestly have no idea what to do then).

There may be other things to take into account. However, every time a certain colleague of mine complains about hundreds of spam mail he gets and how he spends time tuning his Spam tools and cleaning his mailbox I always repeat my words: "I have told you how to do this. I get an occasional spam maybe once in a fortnight. Why don't you do it the easy way?"

The three problems of spam (as ar as I know) are:
- Your important mail is lost in the sea of garbage mail (not sensitive-enough anti-spam tools used)
- Your garbage mail cleaner grabs some of you important emails (too sensitive anti-spam tool used)
- A combination of the two above (a real bad tool used)

Gmail is an almost perfect filter. I do not know how they do it but they are damn good at it.

Still I am glad there are plenty of tools for various needs and I do not think you should stop developing SpamBlocker.

Markku
 
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mkniskanen said:
Still I am glad there are plenty of tools for various needs and I do not think you should stop developing SpamBlocker.
Click to expand...
I don't, either, Markku. The wink (;)) was intended to portray that. Sometimes I wish I could, though :).

Jeff
 
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