Anti-SPAM SMTP Proxy (ASSP) has been installed on a client’s FreeBSD 6.1 mail server for a couple of days now and I have nothing but positive things to say. We’re still “training” the Bayesian filter at this point, so some SPAM is still getting through, but we are blocking the majority of the SPAM […]
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Blocking spam is an arms race between spam detection and detection avoidance techniques. Lately spammers had the upper hand but the tide has turned with new PTR record blocking techniques. This is how implementing PTR record filtering has reduced our spam to nearly zero. Reducing Spam to Nearly Zero with PTR Record FilteringInteresting article […]
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The June 2007 Issue of Inc. Magazine is packed with great content. LashBack is honored to be mentioned with five other best of breed technology companies in a two page spread on pages 50-51 entitled The Best Spam Fighters… Six…
Read More… (From Spam, Anti-Spam, and LashBack…)

I sign up for hundreds upon hundreds of lists. I maintain multiple “hamtraps,” collections of received mail that I actually asked for. So it’s not spam, but sometimes the line gets a little blurred.

Take, for example, a random veterans affairs site. In April I signed up on their site, but never completed registration.

In the past thirty days, they’ve sent me five requests to complete my registration. They may have sent me more requests to complete; I don’t know, because Gmail claims to empty out my spam folder every thirty days.

Yup, they’re going to the spam folder at Gmail.

I have some idea why. It’s for something they did. Or rather, something they won’t do: They won’t let go.

If you keep sending mail to unconfirmed signups every week, you’re driving people nuts. People who don’t want your mail, so they’re reporting it as spam every single time. People who didn’t complete because they don’t want to complete. Maybe sending them a second nudge to complete was OK, but five is far beyond what I’d call an acceptable best practice.

Is it legal? Absolutely. Is it blockable? Absolutely. It wouldn’t suprise me to find that they were having delivery issues at other ISPs, not just Gmail. ISPs, especially the big dogs (AOL, Yahoo, Hotmail) do not take kindly to senders who generate complaints, and it seems very likely that this practice does exactly that.

If you want to be a good sender, confirming your list is great. Asking people to complete their registration is fine. But stop and think: What is reasonable? Five requests (so far, I might add) is overkill. The whole point of confirming is to validate them as a user, counting them as engaged, knowing they want your mail. It’s silly, and damaging, to keep nudging people over and over and over, if they’re clearly choosing not to join this group.

As a sender, you greatly improve your deliverability by jettisoning non-responders. If you keep pinging them repeatedly, you’re denying yourself the benefit of this process, and ensuring that ISPs are going to block your mail.

Not smart.

Read More… (From Al Iverson’s Spam Resource)

The best way to avoid getting Spam in your inbox is by preventing it from getting to your server in the first place. That is where “greylisting” comes in.I recently installed a Greylisting daemon called Postgrey on my Ubuntu Linux mail server and it is awesome. It has reduced the amount of Spam […]
Read More… (From IT Infusion anti-SPAM)

Here’s a tip for everybody who puts together web pages.It may seem obvious, but one big way to avoid receiving SPAM is to keep your email address off of the web. Automated spambots scour the web 24 hours a day looking for email addresses to add to the SPAM distribution lists. If your […]
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We were doing so well!? Most anti-SPAM solutions are getting pretty good at categorizing SPAM by doing statistical analysis on the text found in the email. Run a message through a Bayesian filter, do a few regular expression checks, and you can be relatively sure if a message is SPAM or not.So what happens when […]
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Day One of the Authentication and Online Trust Summit The Big News is the coming launch of the unsubscribe button in the new Windows Live Hotmail User Interface (UI). For Microsoft to recognize unsubscribe as a powerful way to give…
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I just stumbled upon what is probably the definitive article on the “nofollow” controversy. I won’t try to summarize, but I really do suggest you give it a read.My takeThe “nofollow” tag on comments on trackbacks has always bothered me a bit. If someone takes the time to link to my site and […]
Read More… (From IT Infusion anti-SPAM)

Getting your legitimate email through the maze of SPAM filters is a tricky business. Many of the “gotchas” are the result of an improperly configured technical details on your end of things (eg. your server, your DNS, your mail client, etc.). The problem for 99% of email senders is they have very little […]
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I posted recently regarding the battle against image SPAM. One of the comments pointed out that defeating image SPAM was actually fairly straightforward if OCR software was used to scanned image attachments. I agree, but the real problem is that very few people have access to an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) based scanning […]
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Ever worry that your important outbound emails might not be reaching their intended recipients?It seems like everyone has had at least one important email not get through to the intended party, only to find that it was caught in the recipient’s SPAM filter.Successful delivery of legitimate email (ie non-SPAM) is a growing concern with so […]
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Karen J. Bannan wrote an excellent article today which appears in the New York Times Business Section, When They Say You Are a Spammer. Oftentimes writers miss technology stories and a good mention ends up being a confusing one. Karen…
Read More… (From Spam, Anti-Spam, and LashBack…)

I’ve been running ASSP at a client site for Just over a month and I’m really impressed. It was easy to configure and has been quite effective at blocking SPAM.The nicest feature of ASSP is the way that the Bayes filter trains itself without requiring much in the way of human intervention. I […]
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ad:tech San Francisco brought some good news for email marketing. The news from the floor was despite challenges, email is growing. As the impact of compliance and reputation is more deeply understood we are watching our customers evolve their business…
Read More… (From Spam, Anti-Spam, and LashBack…)

From the FuzzyOCR site:FuzzyOcr is a plugin for SpamAssassin which is aimed at unsolicited bulk mail (also known as “Spam”) containing images as the main content carrier. Using different methods, it analyzes the content and properties of images to distinguish between normal mails (Ham) and spam mails.FuzzyOCR combines nicely with Amavisd-new, Spamassassin, Postgrey, and ClamAV […]
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