Spam filters

As I run a few websites, we end up submitting to a lot of directories and search engines etc. Consequently our commercial email addresses such as sales@ are now getting spammed like mad - so you cannot see the real mail anymore. It is turning into a nightmare.

We cannot of course simply change email addresses because sales@ourdomain.com is our known and published address for customers (both old and new). And would only be a short term fix.

We cannot add one of those "click here to confirm" filters as these are a very negative any annoying delay message for new customers (would be OK if personal). Plus would stop a lot of automated and essential email from Paypal, Worldpay etc.

We cannot simply block the sender or IP address, as the spammers are smarter than that and change these continually.

We currently have NORTON ANTI-SPAM loaded but it is as much use as a chocolate radiator - and stops next to nothing (except a few things that I want of course). Frankly I cannot believe that even with regular updates how hopeless NORTON ANTI-SPAM actually is.

So anyone in a "commercial" environment got anything that truly cuts most of this stuff out perhaps?

Cheers in advance gang.

Ahh generic sales@ addresses etc are the worst for spam and the hardest to protect from it, because you want them to be seen by all, and easily reachable by strangers. There is no perfect solution, but I set up some mail servers for some companys in my last job that included all the latest anti-spam stuff like SpamAssassin, Razer and a few others I cant remember. It also had some virus filters there etc. And it learnt automatically too and reloaded new knowledge about spam over the internet on a daily basis. It wasnt perfect but it cut down almost all of the spam.

You can get fairly decent results with various email providers anti-spam stuff too. Gmails seems ok, not as good as my SpamAssassin system though.

So the answer is, its really the responsibility of the people who provide your email service. If you run your own server, get someone to come in for a couple of hours and set up the ultimate spam killing software on the server. If its an external email provider, ask them about the anti-spam package and if they dont have one switch to one who does.

Some clients, and add on software packages for email clients work pretty well too. Thunderbird has a learning spam recognition system that eventually gets pretty good. Might pay to check something like that out too.

I have just realised I hardly get any spam anymore in my main email addresses. About once every couple of weeks from gmail. GMX has heaps of spam but it gets filtered out by thunderbird. I thought it was one of things that USED to bother people, like polio.

Get this on your mail server http://spamassassin.apache.org/

Forward the sales@yourdomain.com address to a Gmail account and let Gmail's spam filters handle it. As I wrote yesterday, their spam-filtering seems to be pretty good.

I assume you're not running your own mail servers. If that's the case there are companies which will filter emails before they arrive in your inbox. Symantec Hosted Mail Security (formerly Brightmail) annual fee is $41.40 p.a. for up to 24 mailboxes if I'm reading their website right. Brightmail had a good reputation but there are other companies.

If you're running your own mail servers there's a load of things you can do but you'll probably be best off paying for someone who knows what they're doing.

Just checked again, it's $41.40 per mailbox per year, not for all of them. Thought it was cheap!

may cost more but these guys are worth it as far as our company's concerned ...Messagelabs

Adding my miniscule contribution: http://keir.net/k9.html. I know a few businesses that use it. It's free, but fairly effective. Takes a while to train itself to filter, but it keeps improving. On nearly 4000 mails, it has now a 94.69% accuracy rating. Maybe that's not high enough for the volumes you are dealing with, but hey, at free, it's worth a shot.

Quick late thanks to Showem on the free spam filter! I was using Norton AntiSpam on its highest settings, but it does not seem to "learn" very intelligently - I cannot tell it when it has made a mistake, only move the items from spam back to my inbox.

Moved to a different PC so decided to try a different solution.

But the free solution, whilst a little fiddly to first set up, seems great so far and it certainly learns really fast. Setup would be quicker if your version of Outlook is compatible 'cos then it can make the changes for you.

So free is actually better than the mighty Norton (which does not help my mate who works for Symantec and his share options).

Glad it worked out Jon. Only one thing I've noticed lately, it's pretty poor at picking out spam mails that are mainly only .GIF files. But as that's still a minority of mails, it's accuracy is still pretty good.

I suspect just about any email filter is gonna struggle with a pure image file.

Not if you tell it to just bin all those that are. Be honest, how many legitimate all-gif-emails do you get?

I've actually heard of a legitimate use for them, but it is not a widesread thing AFAIK.

98.05% accurate at this stage, and even when it gets it wrong it is dead quick to fix. So I check the SPAM folder once a day to be sure, but makes life a lot easier basically.

So delighted with this solution!!!