Made some significant improvements in the AI learner this last week. it’s now been 5 days in a row since anyone release a spam from quarantine or complained about a false positive. Whenever a spam is released from quarantine I get a copy of it and I look into it to figure out what the […]

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This is something I was doing in SpamAssassin but SA is a crude tool. What I’m doing is making files with regular expressions where if a number of matched occur the file mane is used as a token indicating a match. for example, I test for lotsofmoney, truseme, africa, banks, religion, etc. All of which […]

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I decided to post all the details in my support wiki. You can read all about it here.  

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The new filtering system continues to be beyond amazing. And it’s still getting better. I just filed a provisional method patent on it and I’m hoping to license it to big companies and competitors for royalties. I’m not yet ready to disclose how it’s done but hope to soon. This isn’t just about blocking more […]

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I have made a serious breakthrough in spam filtering technology. This is far bigger than when Bayesian filtering was considered a breakthrough. It’s so good that I’m looking into a software patent. I coded it up initially and put it online the evening of December 24th. I’ve been improving it since then. This trick is […]

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I think this new feature – whitelisting subjects – is going to be extremely powerful to avoid false positives. There are a lot of words that spammers would never use in the subjects of their emails that are related to your specific business. Suppose you are an auto repair shop. You might white list phrases […]

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I’m not sure who is more incompetent, Yahoo or Microsoft, when it comes to email systems. Right now Outlook is down. Outlook is not totally down but can only accept a single message at a time.  I’m a small operation doing spam filtering and email hosting and I have better uptime and email services than Microsoft […]

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What the NSA is doing is so morally wrong to rise to the level of a crime against humanity itself. I have decided to put the NSA on notice. If I get an NSA letter I will not keep my mouth shut as instructed. I will immediately publish every detail of all communication with the […]

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This is funny. More people should do this.  

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I will be gone from July 12th through July 20th to the ICANN 47 meeting. I’ve been part of an email group for several years on the Non Commercial Stakeholders Group (NCSG) that advises ICANN on policy. Generally I don’t go to these meetings but two key people couldn’t make it so I was asked […]

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A message to my customers and to the world, As most of you are aware of the government of the United States has a spy program called PRISM where they are tied into companies like Verizon, AT&T, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Dropbox, Yahoo, AOL, etc. These companies have been given papers from the secret FISA […]

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I’ve been seeing the DNS ANY attack against my DNS servers. I’m using PDNS but this should work with BIND or any DNS server. My DNS servers are not recursive, but they are attacking me anyway. I guess I’m the DDOS amplifier. If you think the same thing is happening to you you can detect […]

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SPF known as Sender Policy Framework totally sucks. Especially for people who are in the store and forward spam filtering business. That’s because SPF totally breaks email forwarding. But I’ve developed some rules to detect when a server is going to possible reject our good email based on SPF. Basically I’m changing the sender to […]

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Google is migrating Postini to Google Apps and we’re beginning to get more phone calls from people what really don’t want to go that way. We maintain a system for the more independent minded user who doesn’t want to get sucked into the Google cloud. One thing people like is that you don’t have to […]

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Ever since Yahoo made the mistake of storing password in clear text and having them stolen by hackers it’s been a real headache. Spammers log into yahoo accounts, mine them for email addresses, and then send email from those accounts. Then they have been creating other fake accounts that are similar using those names so […]

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Dear MX Backup Users, I am contacting you today to let you know about changes to our free MX Backup service. We have implemented a new feature that automatically detects if your normal server is active and will return a 4xx error on the backup server if it is. We only accept and store email […]

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I’ve been doing more work on my outbound spam filter lately. I’m good at catching a hacked account but it was taking me 3 minutes to figure out that the account was hacked. This allowed the spammer to get a few thousand outbound spams off and that wasn’t good enough. But when you first see […]

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I have made a LOT of progress recently filtering outgoing spam. Outgoing spam filtering is very different than incoming spam and requires a new strategy. But I’ve figured out a few easy rules that seem to work very well. As you all know I prefer behavior based rules rather than content based rules (like SpamAssassin). […]

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I’ve been thinking about what it would take to actually eliminate spam or reduce it to less than 10% of what it is now. One of the problems is the SMTP protocol itself. And a big problem with that is that mail servers talk to each other using the same protocol as users use to […]

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I’ve noticed a sharp increase in spam coming from Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail and other free mail providers. Not sure what the cause is but the spammers are gaining ground on these services.

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