Author Archive
Posted in December 13th, 2011
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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Posted in April 23rd, 2011
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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Posted in April 8th, 2011
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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Posted in December 1st, 2010
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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Posted in December 10th, 2009
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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Posted in November 14th, 2009
We are getting into the business of filtering outgoing email and relaying outgoing email. If you are interested in this new service pleace contact support@junkemailfilter.com and we’ll get you set up.
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Posted in February 28th, 2008
We now have what I think is the fastest spam bot detection on the planet. Our blacklist are now listing over a million spam bots that have tried to spam us in the last 4 days. We only keep 4 days of data because if we get something wrong or someone fixes their virus problem [...]
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Posted in September 9th, 2007
Made an interesting observation on Friday that spam bots don’t do a QUIT at the end of an SMTP session. Real email servers are polite and after the message is sent they send a QUIT commant to tell the receiving server to close the connection. Spam bots however don’t send the quit command because the [...]
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