Blocking Email Spamming

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"Honey, I Blocked Junk Emails!"

Spam, also known as unsolicited commercial email, has been a real problem now. As an owner of a web hosting business, we have tried hard to fight against junk emails and to educate the general public about ways to fight them together.

First of all, once you receive a spam email, delete it without replying with REMOVE or UNSUBSCRIBE as the subject -- doing this is like telling the senders your email addresses they collected are real. They may stop sending mails to you again, but they will likely sell your email address to others or send to it from another faked email address.

OK, the server side approaches. We have installed on our server two of the following scripts which can be accessed and set up from the Server Control Panel (see its live demo here...)

Spam Assassin -- This is an open-source script that uses a wide range of heuristic tests on mail headers and body text to identify spam. If you get your site hosted with us, you can enable Spam Assassin with just a click of the mouse. To customize the default settings, please use Michael Moncur's SpamAssassin Configuration Generator.
Block Email -- This is a neat email filter that sits on our server to block your unwanted mails. It searches for your speficified phrases in subject/from/body or any header of the incoming mail sent to your site. You can see how it works by going to the live demo of our Server Control Panel and click the link "Block Email" under "MY EMAIL".

However, these approaches are not enough to fight with all unwanted junk mails. The reasons being (1) Spam Assassin only identify a potential spam without deleting or bouncing them, and (2) although you can set up the email filter to block the mails that are tagged by Spam Assassin as spam (e.g. Spam Assassin can rewrite the subject of an identified spam to something that start with *****SPAM*****), you have no chance to preview what emails you are blocking. Basically there is a need for a way to identify and handle spam emails from the client side. We have found the following program/script that do the job nicely:

Windows Based Program - MailWasher Pro As the name suggests, it cleans your incoming emails for you. It allows you to preview all mails without downloading them to your email program such as Outlook Express. Don't want some of the previewed messages? You can easily delete them from your mail server, bounce them back to the senders (as if your email address does not exist!) or add them to a blacklist by clicking on the related checkbox. Only after a certain email address is on the blacklist, will MailWasher Pro automatically delete it. It runs extremely fast. And beside supporting POP3 accounts, it works even with your Hotmail/MSN, IMAP, or even AOL accounts! Now you can get rid of Hotmail or AOL junk mails quick and easy!

In short, our use of this software is so much pleasant that we highly recommend it to everyone -- 30-day free trial download available.

PHP Script - SpamBlitzer This is a piece of software that is similar to MailWasher Pro, but runs on your website server rather than on your computer. The software is written in PHP script language and can be installed easily on your site as long as PHP is supported. Because it runs on your server, it deletes spam emails before you even download them. It comes with 100% money-back guarantee for the first year of your purchase and 300% money-back guarantee for the second year and beyond. More info.

Related Links:

How to Nullify Harmful Worms, Viruses, Scripts or Web Bugs in Emails or Email Attachments Before They Reach Your Email Inbox -- Review of a grass root approach to malicious emails which will make reading your email messages completely safe, even opening email attachments.
Stop Spyware That Sits on Your Computer - In this article, Jim Edwards described how he found with shocks a veritable minefield of dangerous and harmful programs lurking on his computer after scanning for spyware/adware.
Get Spam Protected Email Accounts -- Pay less for email accounts. 2MB, 50MB, 100MB or 250MB email account storage options. All email accounts are fast, reliable, private and secure. Webmail also available. POP3 configuration. SMTP relay.
How to Prevent Your Email Address from Being Collected by Spambots -- Dr. Ralph Wilson discusses the ways to avoid being spammed in the first place.
SpamCheck -- Stop worrying about Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail or any large ISP mistaking your e-mail for spam. Use this FREE tool to make sure that your e-zine is not ending up in your customers' Bulk/Junk Mail folders.

Revised: December 16, 2007 at 17:56

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