Recommended SPAM Filtering Service or Software

Pterocarpous

Hey ya'll

I wasn't sure which would be the proper forum for this post. This seemed to be the more fitting....

I have a client who is suddenly being inundated w/ SPAM on a couple of his domains' email accounts. He's getting around 100 SPAM emails on each one daily.

I recommended that he have his web master encrypt the email links on his web sites in order to (attempt to) thwart web crawler/bots harvesting email addresses for spammers. That's one step toward a solution.

I'm wondering if ya'll know of any reliable & secure online services that his email can be re-directed to for spam filtering

-OR-

if you know of a good SPAM Filtering app. that plays nice w/ Qualcom Eudora and Avast! AV (and isn't hard on resources).

TIA for your feedback!

Thrax

http://www.spamhaus.org/

Pterocarpous

Thrax wrote:

http://www.spamhaus.org/

Thankyou, Thrax. Very good information there. Based on the information there I was able to make some recommendations re: SBL & XBL filtering being applied to the DNS Blacklist on his email servers. If his hosting service will not employ spam filtering on their front end, then I recommended moving their email to a hosting service that does.

To that end, in additon to my original question of recommended online SPAM filtering services I am interested to hear others recommendations re: secure and pro-active (w/ respect to spam & malware filtering) hosting services.

Again, TIA!

DanG

Why not get a hardware box for his end? There are a bunch of different ones available.

Pterocarpous

DanG wrote:

Why not get a hardware box for his end? There are a bunch of different ones available.

That's a good idea, however, in this case I don't think it'd be practical. He has employees spread out across the states who are also affected by the SPAMming of their respective email accounts. Something on the front end (ahead of any of the email accounts) would be more practical.

In addition, his is a home office behind an ISP (consumer (non-business) account). I wouldn't recommend his hosting the email or, in some way, the email be routed through his equipment then back to the users.

Straight_Man

GoDaddy is an ISP that filters well.
They also have VERY good despamming tech, web accessible, for thier email addresses.
Thunderbird has despamming tech also, as part of the programming of the program.

Edit: I know this is a change of what you do not want changed, but it is the cheapest
way to go (change Host for website (which brings antiSPAM)or buy address for email for each user
(which comes with antiSPAM))

Pterocarpous

Straight_Man wrote:

GoDaddy is an ISP that filters well.
They also have VERY good despamming tech, web accessible, for thier email addresses.
Thunderbird has despamming tech also, as part of the programming of the program.

Edit: I know this is a change of what you do not want changed, but it is the cheapest
way to go (change Host for website (which brings antiSPAM)or buy address for email for each user
(which comes with antiSPAM))

Thank you, Straight_Man. Those are very good recommendations. Unfortunately, he wouldn't hear of changing hostings services. Instead, he's going w/ Peer-to-Peer for an online filtering service. They have a free 30-day trial so we'll see how that works out.

As for email clients, he uses Qualcom Eudora - has for eons. I can't see him switching to Mozilla or Netscape. Eudora has a junk mail filter but it's not very effective as far as I can see (as evidenced by his being inundated w/ SPAM into his Inboxes).

Thanx to each of you for your feedback. If you have more info. you'd like to offer I'm certainly open. In the interim, we'll see how Peer-to-Peer plays out. I'll let ya'll know how efficacious it is. It might turn out to be a good service to keep in mind for others who might need it.

mtrox

I'd like to hear some other ideas on this too if anyone has anything that's effective (without too much "management" from a client that barely knows what a right click is). I second Straight-Man on the GoDaddy recomendation. My email goes through GoDaddy and I'm real pleased with them on several accounts. Unfortunately, like Pterocarpous I too have clients who would rather stay with their own crappy little mail host rather than make a change.

By the way Fruit, what did you mean by this?

Pterocarpous wrote:

I recommended that he have his web master encrypt the email links on his web sites in order to (attempt to) thwart web crawler/bots

Did you just mean to have the web master turn the email into a link that doesn't display the addy, or is there something here (yet again) I don't know about?

Pterocarpous

mtrox wrote:

...I'd like to hear some other ideas on this too if anyone has anything that's effective (without too much "management" from a client that barely knows what a right click is)...

That's precisely the problem unfortunately.

mtrox wrote:

...I second Straight-Man on the GoDaddy recomendation. My email goes through GoDaddy and I'm real pleased with them on several accounts...

I'm going to take a closer look at them for my own edification. They sound promising.

mtrox wrote:

...Unfortunately, like Pterocarpous I too have clients who would rather stay with their own crappy little mail host rather than make a change...

In this case, he thinks he's saving money. However, if he would factor in the cost of having to address his SPAM issues by enlisting the services of another provider, he'd see that it, in fact, isn't cost-effective to stay w/ a poorly managed ("crappy") email hosting service.

mtrox wrote:

...By the way Fruit, what did you mean by this? (reference to encrypting email address links on web site) Did you just mean to have the web master turn the email into a link that doesn't display the addy, or is there something here (yet again) I don't know about?...

Ahhh, yes. Well, the story is I had the same problem last year. In fact I had to kill two of my domain email accounts because they were getting slammed w/ SPAM. I suspected web crawlers (bots) were the culprits as I didn't use those email addresses anywhere (for registrations, etc.).

I did some searching on the 'net and found this really cool online tool called eScrambler on a site called InnerPeace.org. (Trust me, I wasn't feeling any inner peace when I was doing this research. I just stumbled on this site in my quest.)

InnerPeace.org
[URL="U:\CONTENTS\_Installables\_Website Development\WebMaster Toolkit from Innerpeace.org\EScramble\How To.htm"]eScrambler How To[/URL]
eScrambler Online Email Link Encryption Tool
InnerPeace.org Webmaster Downloads

You just download the web page(s).
Pull the pages up that have email address links in your favorite HTML editor (I used Front Page)
Copy and paste the encrypted email address (java script) into the page in place of the email link and viola!
Restore the page(s) back to the server.
That's it. The only caveat is, in order to use the links one must enable java script for that web site/page.

mtrox

Thanks Pterocarpous. I'll definitely check that out.

Pterocarpous

mtrox wrote:

Thanks Pterocarpous. I'll definitely check that out.

My pleasure!