Spam Protection,Anti-spam,spam detection and filtering

FAQ is provided to help you understand the Anti-Spam Scanning Service.

How is this service provided?

This Anti Spam Scanning Service is provided from the Data Center Level with distributed, collaborative, SPAM detection and filtering network for the domains you have registered with Email facility. Therefore, you need not install software in any PC in your Local Area Networking.

Will spam be deleted before I retrieve my email? How does it work?

Deleting SPAM mails is provided as an option in your Control Panel. The Server analyses an email for SPAM and the email is marked as “SPAM” or “Definitely SPAM “ in the subject line based on the scoring given for each email. For a email to be marked as “DEFINTELY SPAM” the score should be greater than 20.The emails with score less than 20 up to 5 is marked as SPAM. There might be a genuine email, which might be marked by the Server as SPAM with a score between 5 and 20.

Choosing the delete option may erase these Genuine mails also. For best results, you can observe for a fortnight whether the Server identifies the SPAM mails and you can choose the option to delete the mails for “DEFINITELY SPAM” category. The Administrator is allowed to change with caution, on careful analysis, the recommended scores for SPAM emails in control panel provided for his domain. Our Support team further will extend any help required.

If the spam mails are not deleted, where do they get downloaded?

Email is NOT deleted from your mailbox but the Spam mails will get downloaded with their subject line modified with “SPAM”. The users can have a filter in their email clients (Outlook Express, Netscape Composer, Pegasus mail) so that the spam mails will get filtered in that Email ID locally. Option for forwarding the junk/spam mails to a different email ID is provided, Therefore, the regular POP Accounts is kept away from receiving these Spam mails. For eg, if an email account is configured as filter@yourcompany.com and if you give instructions in control panel to forward all junk mails to this filter email ID. The Administrator can configure “FILTER” account in only one PC in his Local Area Network in his office and download these emails. He can check at a later time.

Will all spam be detected?

No . All the email is scanned and assigned a score based on the likelihood that an email is spam. Scores are used to determine whether an email should be tagged as spam: it is important that this is done to help avoid false-positives and false-negatives.

Is all email tagged as spam, spam?

Not necessarily. The system is not foolproof and there will be instances where genuine email is tagged as spam and where spam is not tagged as such. This is why all email is delivered by default, so you can filter them email in your email client to FILTER ID and check through the spam to ensure there is no email that you actually need.

How do I know whether and email is a spam?

There are two methods used to identify these emails to you. Firstly, the subject line of the affected email will be prefixed with one of the following:

{Spam?} - Indicates that the email is likely to be spam - you should filter these emails into a separate folder in your email client.

{Definitely Spam?} - Indicates that the email is almost definitely spam because it got a very high detection score - you should filter these emails into a separate folder in your email client.

Anti-Spam Self-Help Checklist - What can I do to prevent receiving spam? Here is a list of things you can do to help prevent receiving spam in the first place:

Do not use a catchall email account on your domain(s). Only list aliases and POP accounts that you actually use. This stops the frequent SPAMs that fire off emails to a list of names on a domain. Obfuscate your email addresses on your website, i.e. replace them with JavaScript "trick" email addresses, or, switch to web forms for initial contact, rather than displaying an email address.

Never, ever, click on any links in any spam - especially not to "unsubscribe". All this does is confirm to the spammer that they have a "live" address. Configure your client to read any incoming emails in plain text, never html. Html spam emails contain links to graphics and scripts on SPAMMERS sites, confirming your email address.

Exim Dictionary Attack

A common technique for SPAMMERS to use is what is known as a dictionary attack on a domain. A dictionary attack, in our context, is a single SMTP connection that attempts to send email from a spam source to a random set of names on our domain, e.g. bob@ourdomain.com , fred@ourdomain.com. SPAMMERS hope that one of the many hundreds that we try will get a hit and deliver our spam.

Spammers use this technique mainly because most people don't advertise their email addresses (due to spam!) and they want to access this untapped market.

We have full protection against this type of attack. It not only stops an active dictionary attack, but also prevents further attempts to send email to our server from the spammers IP address.

Note: This anti-attack function will not work if you have your domains Default Address set to anything other than :fail: because, by definition, if you accept catchall email, there's nothing to bounce. You should also always use :fail:. :fail: rejects email in invalid recipients at the RCPT stage of SMTP mail processing.