Spam & Virus Filtering - Powered By Kayako eSupport

06 Sep 2010

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	Spam & Virus Filtering

Article QUESTION: Please explain what measures Orange County Online, Inc. takes to help control Spam and Virus's from arriving in my Inbox

ANSWER: SPAM has been an ongoing problem for all users of the Internet for some time. As an Internet Service Provider we inevitibly have clients upset with us because they are getting too much SPAM and we have an equal amount of clients upset with us because they are not getting some of their legitimate email.

Our First and Foremost responsibilty is to get ALL of your Legitimate Email to you. We also want to provide you with tools to reduce the amount of Spam you receive. The delemma is the Higher one sets the Spam Filtering settings to try and catch the maximum amount of Spam - the more Legitimate Email that gets caught.

The best way to handle this is to place all control of Spam Filtering into "your" hands. Our current system allows you to decide how much Spam Filtering is done and what to do with email that is Identified as Spam.

If you are on our current SmarterMail Email server we use the following methods for checking and identifying email as Spam;

This system uses the following for SPAM Filtering;
SPAMCOP (http://www.spamcop.net/)
ORDB (http://www.ordb.org/)
SORBS (http://www.au.sorbs.net/)
SPAMHAUS SBL-XBL (http://www.spamhaus.org/)

We also scan using Bayesian Filtering
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_filtering)

In addition the server auto blocks IP's that are sending bulk amounts of email to the server.

In addition to Scanning all Inbound Email against these filters we scan for Viruses using F-prot AntiVirus (http://www.f-prot.com/)

When you log in here - http://webmail.oco.net (or http://webmail.yourdomainname.com)

You can click on "Settings" and then select "My Spam Filtering"

Here you can set what to do with email that is identified as Spam (Send it to the Junk Mail Folder, Delete It etc.). There are also Help Files available in the WebMail Interface to assist you.

A short explanation of how the server decides if a Spam Message is LOW, MEDIUM or HIGH probability of being Spam.

Each of these Spam Filters is assigned a weight of "10"

SPAMCOP (http://www.spamcop.net/)
ORDB (http://www.ordb.org/)
SORBS (http://www.au.sorbs.net/)
SPAMHAUS SBL-XBL (http://www.spamhaus.org/)

If an Email is found on one of the lists it is given a Weight of "10" - or - a LOW Probability of being SPAM

If an Email is found on any combination of two of the lists it is given a Weight of "20" - or - a MEDUIM Probability of being SPAM

If an Email is found on any combination of three of the lists it is given a Weight of "30" - or - a HIGH Probability of being SPAM

In order to reduce the amount of Email you have to review in your JunkMail Folder - you may find that Deleting Medium and High probability Spam works best, this way only Low Probability Spam will be in the JunkMail folder for your review. You can play with the settings and set it to what works best for you.

Some clients are concerned that the JunkMail folder will just continue to fill up and eventually use all of thier available Email Storage space on the server...this will not happen as when the Folder reaches 10MB it will Auto Clean itself and reduce it's size to 2MB and start all over again until it reaches 10MB again and thus Auto Cleans again.

If you require Additional Spam filtering we suggest you check out products like the following;

1) Outlook 2003 (it has built in Spam Filtering)
2) InBoxer (http://www.inboxer.com/)
3) iHateSpam (http://www.sunbelt-software.com/iHateSpam.cfm)

There are of course many others.

We have Flash Tutorials available for our users:

How to setup Spam Filtering in SmarterMail:
http://www.oco.net/tutorials/smartermail/sm3-spam.html

How to setup Content Filtering in SmarterMail:
http://www.oco.net/tutorials/smartermail/sm3-content.html

How to setup Trusted Senders in SmarterMail:
http://www.oco.net/tutorials/smartermail/sm3-trusted.html

We hope this helps, please review Help Files included in the WebMail Interface for additional Information.

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Created On:

28 Nov 2005 02:01 PM