Pirate Radio » The Frogfoot eMail Filtering Process

06
Apr
16:01

The Frogfoot eMail Filtering Process

Categories: eMail Support

5 Comments »
post author

Author: joe (Pablo)

We’ve recently received some emails, and phone calls, from our customers about SPAM. We really know how you feel, SPAM wastes a lot of our time. In a general 24hr period the Frogfoot mail servers handle roughly 87000 messages, we reject about 65000 messages of which about 2000 contain viruses. Only about 20000 make it through. That means that more than 75% is unwanted mail. It gets quite technical but we’ve drawn up a really cool diagram that illustrates exactly how our SPAM filtering works. Check it out if you’re looking for a deeper understanding of the process.

Mail Filtering Process

You should know that even with statistics like that there is presently no effective way to avoid 100% of all SPAM. It is, unfortunately, a fact of life in the 21st Century a bit like the petrol price and more recently load-shedding.

To avoid it all together we could configure our SPAM scanning systems to be much more aggressive but then the chances of us flagging an important email as spam increase exponentially. This very uptight approach to SPAM is not effective. You see while computers are super intelligent they’re not as perceptive as people. Sometimes the SPAM is so well crafted that they can’t see the difference between it and a real message.

Obviously our primary concern is to make sure you get all your important email so we had to ask ourselves the following questions; is it better to ensure that you receive no SPAM but also end up losing some vital email? Or is it better to get all your mail and occasional receive an inappropriate SPAM message that includes one-liners like “dreaming of a bigger love stick”?

We decided that it was better for you to receive all your emails and deal with the frustration of SPAM than miss out on anything because our filtering methods were too stringent.

You can also help in the battle by using an intelligent email client, like Thunderbird, to flag any SPAM that slips through the woodwork. This method, coupled with our SPAM filtering methods, is the most effective way of dealing with the few last bit of SPAM that find their way into your Inbox.

« Prev Post Next Post »

5 Comments »

Peter Wood Says
April 15, 2008 @ 15:27

Hi –

Thanks for this update. Being in the IT industry, I understand the problems, and use Thunderbird as suggested. However, probably 25-50% of our email is spam on any one day and my wife (who is the primary user of the Frogfoot email account) does not appreciate it at all.

I feel that whatever filter you are using to identify Spam is not effective, or your filtering could be more aggressive without loosing much “real” email. I say this on the basis that I get less spam through my Gmail and work e-mail addresses (which I give out more often), and that friends and family with bigger ISPs such as MWeb seem to get far less spam.

Any thoughts? How about implementing some kind of quarantine system?

Thanks
Peter
joe Says
April 15, 2008 @ 16:14

Hi Peter

20% spam after training Thunderbird to identify your spam seems high.

My incoming mail uses the same spam filtering process and I get about 8 spam messages a day.. which is not bad considering the volume of mail I receive daily.

I’ll see what what our options are for making our spam filtering more aggressive for specific accounts.
Johann Says
April 15, 2008 @ 22:13

Hi Peter

Looks neat. Do you provide a similar offering for clients with their own hosted mail servers; e.g. Exchange 2003/2007? If so, do you provide a weblogin for sysadmin to release any false positives and to add whitelisted domains?

Lastly, and this is usually the humdinger if you do provide the above as stipulated, does your spam offering offer reporting to individual users of spam caught with the option to release the false positives aka BrightMail/ etc. style?

Your feedback will be appreciated

Regards,
Johann
joe Says
April 16, 2008 @ 07:40

Hi Johann

We’ve looked at all those options and implemented some of them in the past. In our experience it’s only “power users” who care about these tools and take the time to train and configure the systems for their needs.

I see our mail filtering system as a first (safe) barrier that does not require time or attention form our users base.

Every power user usually has their own very specific and diverse need. They want things “just the way they want them”… which is why we suggest client side filtering as the final step. Either with a mail client or something like Spamassassin.

We offer our mail filtering process as an option if you host a mail server with us. Mail filtering happens for our Mailbox services, our Xen Mail Server services and optionally for managed or colo servers.
Peter Wood Says
April 16, 2008 @ 14:16

Hi Joe –

Thanks for the feedback. Hope your filter review bears fruit! We don’t get very much email by most stds – 10 to 20 per day, sometimes less, so 8 spam messages would be a lot for us. I’m not sure how closely spam volume is related to how ‘good’ mail sent/received – more to do with access to the address by those harvesting? Anyway, it’s good to have the dialog.

Peter