Red Cube Hosting

Archive for June, 2007

Image spam is annoying, hard to detect and it’s on the increase. We have made some improvements to our spam filtering which allow us to detect image spam and block it.

We are now using the FuzzyOCR plugin to SpamAssassin to scan images in emails which match certain criteria. FuzzyOCR carries out several image-specific checks to look for characteristics typical of image spam. It also uses optical character recognition (OCR) to find words within pictures and calculate the probability of the image containing spam. This is a resource intensive process, so there are several optimisations in place in our configuration to ensure we only scan images that really need scanning. This technology is pretty reasonably to false positives - so unless you’re taking pictures in a pharmacy or on a trading floor you shouldn’t notice any difference other than a cleaner inbox.

To help reduce quantity of spam arriving in customers mailboxes, we are now checking all inbound email against Sane Security’s phishing and scam filers. These are specifically aimed at so called phishing emails and scam emails (such as 419 scams).

We are have also added the MSRBL blacklists, on a trail basis. This is an attempt to filter our as much image-base spam as possible. We are currently quarantining any email caught using these filters and checking regularly for false positives (we had none during testing).

This is in addition to the existing measures we use (such as various RBLs and statistical analysis of email).

We’re pleased to announce the launch of our brand new hosting service.

We have moved to brand new super-quick servers, and added an array of new features including a comprehensive control panel and webmail. We have also improved our virus and spam filtering (still standard with all our hosting packages) and increased disk space and transfer allowances in all of our packages.

There are plenty of other exiting new changes planned, so we have setup this blog to keep you up to date.