Stop the spam!

Stop the spam!

If you’ve used email services you will be familiar with the scourge of spam, aka junk email, which is estimated to compose between 80-85% of all email in the world. HostAway utilises a number of practices to limit the amount of spam you receive:

Greylisting
Greylisting is an anti-spam measure that works on the basis that spammers will not retry on receiving a failure message from the mail server. Greylisting exploits this by giving a ‘temporary failure’ message to the server that it is receiving mail from. This temporary failure message is designed to make the sending server try again later (similar to a telemarketer finding your phone engaged, spammers often simply move on to the next address in their list). Once a mail server tries again, the mail is accepted and the Greylisting system records the originating email address as well as the originating server. Future mail directed to the target email address is accepted instantly. Additionally, the delay imposed by Greylisting can sometimes result in a compromised mail server being discovered before it has a chance to retry sending mail to the intended recipient.

SpamAssassin
SpamAssassin is a widely used spam filtering program which gives each email you receive a spam ‘score’ based on various factors. This score is increased when the filter comes across characteristics associated with spam such as ‘Lose Weight Today’ in the subject line or malformed sender addresses. SpamAssassin automatically updates the rules that are used to filter spam emails every day and is constantly updated by the community and developers, this increases the chances of spam being flagged and offers greater protection as the filter improves. Once an email is given a high enough spam score (you can set this threshold in the members panel) the email is either tagged as spam or removed completely, depending on what score it receives. We have recently upgraded to the newest version of SpamAssassin to ensure the protection is up to date so you may notice you now receive less spam.

RBL Filtering
RBL (Real-time Blackhole List) filtering works by monitoring a list of blocked IP addresses which is supplied by a number of anti-spam organisations. When our mail server receives an email for you it looks at the network that the message came from, and then looks it up in these lists. If the network this email address came from was found in this list then the email will be rejected. This helps protect you against compromised web servers and is regularly updated by the anti-spam organisations to ensure the protection is up to date.

members-panel

For more information about spam, or to report spam from an Australian source please visit https://www.acma.gov.au/stop-getting-spam

HostAway also provides Premium spam filtering as an optional service, please contact us for more details.

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