How good is your reputation?
New Scientist. Well, that’s their claim anyway. But I disagree. They report that a group of computer scientists have claimed to develop an “effectively perfect” method for blocking spam. YAWN. Same story. Different writer. Different day. Fact is by the time I started researching this “new” method, Amir Lev, CTO at Commtouch had already blogged it and effectively said, “kudos guys…you invented what we’ve been doing all along.”
The magic behind Commtouch is RPD. RPD stands for Recurrent Pattern Detection. In layman’s terms: the technology identifies and classifies message patterns. It analyzes massive amounts of traffic in real time; searches for patterns that will classify a message as spam and then using that information it identifies malicious messages and blocks them from your inbox, all within minutes of an outbreak. RPD blocks 98% of spam and maintains a tiny false positive level.
In a nutshell, it all boils down to your reputation. If you send relevant mail from your server you maintain a good reputation. You start sending irrelevant mail and you develop a bad reputation. Once that bad reputation is in place you get blacklisted and now you have extra work on your hands.
I remember when I was in college. I had the reputation of being an outdoorsy guy who spent more time on his mountain bike in the woods than in the classroom. When people wanted a great place to hike or ride…they would call me for advice. If they needed advice on physics or molecular biology they called…well…anyone but me. Why? Because I had ZERO credibility in that area. Your reputation attracts a specific niche audience. Commtouch’s reputation speaks for itself and that is part of the reason we’re a satisfied business partner with them. The New Scientist? Well…I’ll just leave that there.
As for spam? We don’t like it. We don’t ask for it. It’s effectively a pain and a nuisance. But there are some solid anti-spam solutions available. We chose Commtouch because of the reputation of their technology, its ease-of-use, and affordability. The solution you choose needs to meet your specific needs as well as provide you with rock-solid protection. I am interested though…what solutions are you using? How are you using them? How effective are they? How much maintenance is required on your part? Leave your comments below.
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Would like to better our reputation, in the mail server world. I’m not a mail server Admin but have been placed in the chair, I do the best I can, but have a box to working, I do not write the checks, but required to keep the mail flowing. What can I do to make our Imail 9.21 server off the spam and back scatter list. We use Declude as a spam filter, and it works. But it looks like there are a number of domains that are sending mail from our domain. How do I track this down and disallow that? Any help would be great!
Hello Mike,
Welcome to the Mail Admin world, you will find that IMail is a straight forward product and with IMail v11 our Console and Web Administrator interface makes it very easy to administer locally on the server or from home via the web.
To touch on your question there could be a couple of issues.
A. Relay option not configured properly
B. A user has a virus or allowed a spammer to obtain their username and password and are relaying through your mail server or
C. Spammers are spoofing your Email domain and sending from their own servers.
Each of these scenarios can require a more in depth look at your configuration and mail logs. I would recommend you contact our technical support team at 706-312-3500 with your Service Agreement number and we will help you keep your reputation on the internet clean along with helping you upgrade to the latest version of IMail.