Red Cube Hosting

Archive for April, 2008

Since we wrote last week about our updated spam filtering, we have been rejecting more spam than ever. In the last 7 days we have rejected 189,956 junk emails - that’s almost three every second.

Messages that are rejected are ones we know are spam - these fall into three main categories:

• Emails which are malformed or are sent in a way which is non-standards compliant, these are either spam is emails being sent via a broken mail server.
• Mail from computers known to be used by spammers - we use DNSBL’s to find out if the computer sending email through our servers is a known spammer or not.
• Messages which our spam filtering software is very confident are spam, such as those which match a Distributed Checksum Clearinghouse, or have a very high combined score from all the tests we carry out.

Further to this, our software identified 6,611 emails which were likely to be spam but weren’t confident enough about to reject - these are the ones which are arrive with “***SPAM***” in the subject line.

We also identified 302 viruses in emails*; this may seem low - but this is because the majority of viruses were rejected before they got as far as the virus scanner.

Spam and virus filtering statistics for the past week (click to enlarge).

* Please note, although we do check incoming emails for viruses, we strongly advise our customers to run anti-virus on their machines, especially if they run Windows.

We have just put the latest version of our webmail system live. This version is a significant update, and includes some long-outstanding features (marking email as read/unread) as well as some useful enhancements such as HTML message message composition and a preview pane.

We’ve also made further improvements to our spam filtering system over the last few days. Initial indications are that the new filtering we have put in place has made a significant improvement to our “hit rate” so we are now rejecting (rather than tagging - emails that arrive with *** SPAM *** prepended to the subject line) more spam than ever.