I have been trying to fight spam with SpamAssasin... othe suggestions?

[fearmydesign]

Hi everyone, I have been trying to battle spam reaching our server for a about 6 months now. We are now getting close to 1,500 spam emails per day (if not more). What I have been trying to figure out is how to eliminate this problem (or minimize it); I started using SpamAssasin a while back and what this does is send anything category '5' to a [email protected] email address and then we can empty out the [email protected] address. For some users that are getting more spam we activated the Box Trapper which requires anyone sending emails to them to verify their address first.

What other things can we do to eliminate these spam emails from getting to our server and consuming these resources?

What other settings can we tweak to minimize (maybe not eliminate) the amount of spam coming in?

I've also thought about changing the whole companies email addresses to a format like [email protected] instead of just [email protected] ...?

I know that this is a vast topic, but I would love to hear other things that you have implemented to fight spam on your servers, other ideas etc.

Thank you

 

[cPanelTristan]

You could filter everything through gmail using something like gmail hosted mail, then forward it from there to the server. Gmail seems to have the best spam filtering tool out there, so if you only forward non-spam emails from gmail to the machine, it should drastically cut down on the spam. You could then get rid of the catchall address you are currently using and instead check the spam in the gmail account.

Since gmail is free and they configure their own spam filtering, it seems like you'd be taking a lot of the work out of figuring out your own implementation if you used it instead for that process and only routed emails they don't consider spam to your cPanel machine.

 

[fearmydesign]

You could filter everything through gmail using something like gmail hosted mail, then forward it from there to the server. Gmail seems to have the best spam filtering tool out there, so if you only forward non-spam emails from gmail to the machine, it should drastically cut down on the spam. You could then get rid of the catchall address you are currently using and instead check the spam in the gmail account.

Since gmail is free and they configure their own spam filtering, it seems like you'd be taking a lot of the work out of figuring out your own implementation if you used it instead for that process and only routed emails they don't consider spam to your cPanel machine.

Thanks, I was just reading about this option when you replied... so it looks like I could open a Google Apps account and pay $50 for 25GB for each email address, I would then just change the MX records on the server to point to Google... does this sound correct? or were you talking about doing it a different way?

*** I just realized that it's $50 / year / per user !!! :-/

 

[cPanelTristan]

There isn't any free option any longer for google hosted emails? I have a free account myself on there, so I wasn't aware it was setup that way nowadays to only have paid options.

Rather than opening an account for each email user or each domain, you could simply smart route all the emails to google hosted at one email address as your catchall, have it filter the emails, then have it forward them onto the email accounts after filtering.

 

[fearmydesign]

There isn't any free option any longer for google hosted emails? I have a free account myself on there, so I wasn't aware it was setup that way nowadays to only have paid options.

Rather than opening an account for each email user or each domain, you could simply smart route all the emails to google hosted at one email address as your catchall, have it filter the emails, then have it forward them onto the email accounts after filtering.

Just to make sure, you are talking about this correct? Google Apps helps groups build communities – Google Apps

 

[cPanelTristan]

Yes, the free option should allow up to 50 email accounts for each domain that is signed up to the service from my understanding. If each domain is its own organization, then each domain would sign up for a separate account. You wouldn't want to lump all organizations into one account anyway (each has a different domain after all).