Spam Spam and a Slice of Dedicated Ham!

[talkwebhosts.co]

For your dedicated servers what programs are you using to block out all that uneeded SPAM? Does it work to your expectations?

 

[beley]

Do you mean block incoming spam or block users from sending spam?

We use SpamAssassin to block incoming spam on a per-account basis. Those that want it can turn it on in CPanel. I personally turn it on for most of my clients though, as it seems to do a great job and I haven't seen hardly any false-positives.

We just have the normal security measures setup for outgoing email... maximums per hour per account, monitoring, disabled default formmail scripts, etc.

 

[talkwebhosts.co]

Incoming spam is what I am referring too. What does everyone else use? Is SpamAssassin pretty much the norm?

 

[Piper]

yes, SpamAssasin is the one my ISP has built in to their control panel which is Plesk. Are you having a problem with SPAM? Most ISP's provide it on the server level.
You can also try SpamKiller by Mcaffee.
My ISP is called sparkservers.net and any server that you lease from them will have SPAM Assasin in the control panel.

 

[xion]

RBL's pretty much take care of most of it

 

[AlexF]

Pretty much the same here: SA, RBL's and ACL's as well as a hardware appliance.

 

[xion]

This helps also:

"netstat -nee | grep "\:25" | awk ' { print $5 }' | awk -F: '{ print $1 }' | sort|uniq -c"

That will print each ip connected to port 25 and the number of connections. I've found IPs with 60 connections. Typically from china

 

[talkwebhosts.co]

This helps also:

"netstat -nee | grep "\:25" | awk ' { print $5 }' | awk -F: '{ print $1 }' | sort|uniq -c"

That will print each ip connected to port 25 and the number of connections. I've found IPs with 60 connections. Typically from china

Wow, great advice on this one!

 

[wetalkhosting.com]

xion how often do you use these commands for spam? Seems like alot of work!

 

[xion]

Only when I notice a high server load with a lot of exim processes. All the exim processes will have a PWD of / and there won't be a huge load of messages in the queue. So from that you can tell that its incoming spam.

 

[celador]

www.configserver.com has an anti-spam install service which may be worth looking at

 

[Trexhost]

For incoming spam, we use SpamAssasin as well.

 

[bra]

Does this block the messages from every reaching the mailbox or is it for redirecting into a spam designated mailbox?

 

[imported_12DollarHost]

SpamAssassin is typical. There are some other options available. Don't use SpamAssassin on lower end servers it it very resource intensive.

 

[bangfor]

If you are a web hosting service you should give your customers the opt-out option from receiving junk mail, because some people go over them quickly to see if there is something interesting. Some of your customers could send out mass automated email too, which might be junk mail but not spam.

 

[laarni080]

In using servers for blocking the spam, not all email spams are been blocked, some still enter email accounts.

 

[cricom]

I use SpamArrest quite effectively. I have been receiving anywhere between 500-1000 spam messages a day, and now a couple per day might come through.

 

[Derek@BP6.Net]

MailScanner and Spamassassin together are very affective at blocking spam and viruses.

The key ingredient is to configure MailScanner to block any connections from hosts listed in spam DNSBLs and RBLs. Blocking the email before it is processed drastically reduces server load.

 

[TeleSouthNet]

We are about to deploy the Plesk Spamassassin module on a managed box. I am praying that it works well as we have not tried this yet. Keeping fingers crossed.

 

[TeleSouthNet]

Here is a report of our experiences:

We deployed the Spamassassin module that interacts with our Plesk hosting software. Once it is up and running each user has their own control panel to "Train" the software on what is spam and what is not. I have to say, I am VERY IMPRESSED with the ease of implimentation and training the end users to use this solution.

I would put the success rate in the high 90's. We are still training the system and I expect the system to get better with time.

Regards,

Walter R. Carter
TeleSouth Network Inc