Getting Rid of Spam?

NetHosted Customer Joined: 06 Jul 2006 Posts: 28

I've recently started getting some very objectionable spam, and I'm not sure how to go about stopping it. Is it possible to have the server scan the mail before I get it? I undertand that I can arrange this in Outlook, but I check my email on my phone, and via webmail, so that's not really an ideal solution.

The headers of the two mails I got today are as follows:

NetHosted Staff Joined: 22 Mar 2004 Posts: 5684

Stuart,

The best you can do is run SpamAssassin + BoxTrapper. For these particular mails a simple Subject Mail Filter would work as that is a common feature between them.

I'm afraid spam is the problem it is by the very nature that it's so hard to block effectively.

Andrew

NetHosted Customer Joined: 06 Jul 2006 Posts: 28

Thankyou for the extremely prompt reply, Andrew (Don't you ever sleep?!

). I've activated SpamAssassin and BoxTrapper, how do I go about making them 'work'? I assume I need to do something in Outlook?

NetHosted Staff Joined: 22 Mar 2004 Posts: 5684

SpamAssassin and BoxTrapper both work server side as you required. The default SpamAssassin score is 5.0 which is aggressive. You could set that lower but you would risk getting too many false positives.

SpamAssassin rewrites subject headers, so you would need to setup Outlook to filter out the subjects that SpamAssassin labels as spam. But having enabled BoxTrapper this might not be needed as you are asking each person who emails you to verify who they are.

Thanks,

Andrew

NetHosted Customer Joined: 06 Jul 2006 Posts: 28

Strange - I've enabled BoxTrapper, but haven't changed anything else, and the spam is still getting through... If I changed the SpamAssassin to a lower score (4.0, say), what would happen to those emails flagged as spam? Would they still get through, but into a spam folder?

NetHosted Staff Joined: 22 Mar 2004 Posts: 5684

I've just taken a look at your account, you have not enabled BoxTrapper for any of your email addresses...

Andrew

Posted: Fri Oct 13, 2006 1:32 pm Post subject:

edit: Ooops, misread the bit I was quoting/replying to. Anyhow, if you want to see why a spam message is not getting flagged, then what I've written should help...

Open up the message in Outlook and select View>Options.
You should see an "Internet headers" box, which contains the headers for the e-mail.
If you scroll down, you should see various X-Spam-* headers, which are added by SpamAssassin.
Somewhere there should be a score (or hits or level) header that tells you the score.
If the score is under 5 and the message is definitely spam, you'll need to add some additional tests to SpamAssassin so that it increases the score. (or raise the points given to existing tests)

NetHosted Customer Joined: 06 Jul 2006 Posts: 28

NetHosted Staff Joined: 22 Mar 2004 Posts: 5684

When someone not on your whitelist (trusted list) sends an email BoxTrapper sends back a verification email that the person must respond too. This causes them to be verified. Fine for personal users but might not work so well for companies e.g. if Tesco send you a newsletter they wont respond I imagine.

Andrew

NetHosted Staff Joined: 22 Mar 2004 Posts: 5684

NetHosted Customer Joined: 06 Jul 2006 Posts: 28

Thanks for the help, by the way - been a busy few days, but I'll try your ideas.

Thanks again!

Stuart.

NetHosted Customer Joined: 06 Oct 2006 Posts: 169

You might want to check my suggestion at the bottom of this thread as well http://community.nethosted.co.uk/topic1645_training_the_spam_filter.html

. I've set this up for a friend so that suspected spam and largely clean emails go to separate mailboxes. Then when he is out and about he only checks the "largely clean" box; back at base both mailboxes are downloaded and the suspected spam sent to a sep. folder for occasional checking for false positives (as I said in the other thread, I've not seen any of those yet ...)

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