No More Spam!

There's no doubt that everyone is receiving more spam email these days. We've noticed it as much as you have. In reading industry reports, we see instances of what they're calling "Spam Storms" happen. For instance, the highest amount of spam email ever was in August 2007, when a storm hit. Unfortunately, these cannot be predicted during the evening news.

So what's a company to do? Well, we've been doing research and testing here at Webstix, Inc. and we've found a number of solutions. Some are free and can easily be set up and others require subscriptions to services with small fees. Let's go over these options and how they relate to the email accounts we provide on our servers at Webstix, Inc.

1. Spam Assassin. This is software available on our server that rates words and characteristics of emails that are commonly found in spam emails. It gives each item a set amount of points. Then, if your account is set at let's say 7, and if the points total 7 or more, it will tag that email as spam - usually with the word "SPAM" in the subject line. You will receive that email still, but in your email program, you can set up a filter to put all emails with that subject line into a junk mail folder so that you can check it for emails that might have been falsely labeled as spam email.

This can be done with the settings in the Plesk control panel on the server. There is no cost for this.

2. MailFoundry.com. This is a service that sorts through all your email and tags suspected spam email with "[IG] SPAM:" in the subject line - similar to Spam Assassin. If something is not spam, then you have to forward that message back to them so that they don't block it again. This also requires that you set up filters in your email program.

With a service like this (and the next one we'll mention), you will need every email account on your domain to switch over. You can't just have some of your email accounts use this.

The disadvantage of this one is that they don't offer a control panel. You will get all the suspected spam email and you have to forward false positives back to them. So it's a little bit of work, but it works. This one will only clean up email for the account it's set up for, so if you have other email forwarding to a main email account, then it will not filter that other email.

Contact us to sign up with Mailfoundry since we have an account and we need to make adjustments to your DNS settings.

3. Postini. This is a nice service. It's similar to MailFoundry, but they have a control panel and they also seem to filter spam from all mail in your account - even if it's forwarded from another email account. With the control panel, you check for false positives there (they are NOT delivered to you) and from there, you can specify that an email gets delivered to you.

Google has actually bought this company recently. We believe that they are using this spam filtering technology for Gmail.

Like MailFoundry, all email accounts in your domain need to subscribe to the service. Contact us to sign up with Postini since we have an account and we need to make adjustments to your DNS settings.

4. Webstix Enterprise Email. This is more than just email! It has features like group calendaring, secure file transfers and other enterprise level features along with spam email filtering. If this sounds like a good fit for your growing business, please contact Webstix, Inc. and we'd be glad to get you more information.

5. The Gmail Loop. This one you'll want to try at your own risk, but it works pretty well after you get it set up. What you do is set up a redirect from your email account on our server (via the Plesk control panel) to your Gmail account (you must already have a Gmail account). Gmail then cleans the spam for you and then you configure your email program (like Outlook) to grab your email from Gmail's servers - all cleaned up.

When you do this, you'll probably want to turn off your mailbox on our server so that mail doesn't gather there or else set up Gmail to "pop" your account (grab mail from it) and then delete the mail once it has grabbed it. With this set up, you can also send email from Gmail with your domain name. This is free and seems to work pretty well.

Here is the current pricing for these spam email options: