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SPAM FILTERING BY ISPs

Can anyone advise me about spam filtering by ISPs please? -- do any ISPs do it on broadband connections, does it work in practice, is it advisable and if not, why not?

I am now getting so much spam that I am considering changing my otherwise trouble-free ISP if I can find one that offers a filtered broadband connection.

But I'd like to hear from anyone with some experience of this please, especially on any problems encountered in allowing the ISP to filter out the spam.

Many thanks.
 
Well, I dont know much about ISPs, but I use yahoo email, which is free. The advantages are that you get spam filtering stuff (very good as well) that send it to a bulk folder, this then is veiwable but with one click you can send it all away. On my main account which I have been very careful with, I get NO spam. Well, about one every 2 months, but they never reoccur.

The disadvantages are that you only get 6mb of storage space (unless you pay for a better account) and that sending email size is limited, I think to either 1 or 2mb.

I find it great. But above all, be careful in where you put your email addy.
 
I'm with Global Internet ( part of Brightview ) and they filter spam, and viruses. The virus checker seems to get most current know viruses. The spam filter marks spam as probable spam in the title, which is a nice feature,..... but .... it marks about one email every two to three months. As I am receiving 100 to 150 spams a day I don't think its such a great figure.
 
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V21 use something called "Declude" to filter spam on their mailservers, there seem to have been a fair number of complaints about missing emails and no opt out option (I haven't lost any since they replaced their mailserver - the old one was a POS)

On the other hand their mail server software is near the best I've used - you can set up mail filtering rules on the server itself using regular expressions, and filter on the emails contents not just the headers.

I use just one simple rule to delete most virus, if it provided IMAP access and just flagged spam so you could use rules to check it, it would be near perfect.
 
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Well, Zen just e-mailed me yesterday to say they were introducing free virus scanning for every customer. I assume the reason why they haven`t implemented anti-spam software is because there isn`t anything suitable on the market.:(

Instead of relying on the ISP why don`t you install anti-spam software at your end ?
 
ANTI-SPAM ON MY PC

Yes, I use Zen too, but I was wondering if I could improve things by getting my spam pre-filtered.

I think I will have to instal Cloudmarket Spamnet, which has been recommended to me by some web-techie friends.

But I am getting fed up with having to become a techie myself just to use a computer and have internet access. I just want to do the things I want to do.
 
We filter for spam, and by default tag anything we suspect to be spam by adding *****SPAM***** to the subject line. The customer can then choose to look at the email or filter/delete it using the email client.

We can, of course if the customer wishes also either "server side" delete spam emails, or leave the mail feed untouched.

We would not like to impose a customer wide rule that deletes all spam server side, as some customers actully like spam!

The spam filters we use seem to work increadibly well, and get a lot of positve feedback from customers.
 
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Care to enlighten us to the type of filtering you use, e.g. open relay blacklists, word filters, bayesian techniques etc...?
 
We use SpamAssassin (http://www.mirror.ac.uk/sites/spamassassin.taint.org/spamassassin.org/).

It uses many different types of filtering combined to give each incoming email a score. If the score is above a predetermined level, it is classes as spam.

It checks open relay lists, Bayesian, DCC, word filters, header checks and more.

As I said, we have found it very reliable (after a few tweeks with the scoring policy) and get *very* few false positives, with a virtually spam free mail feed.
 
Thanks...

I'll have to look again at spamassassin. I didn't realise it did bayesian (which has proved most reliable for me). I currently use K9, but it's got a few bugs, most notably its apparant use of the list box control to store data about messages - if you click a toolbar button, then select something else in the listbox, the action will be applied to the new selection!

As my server is WinNT4, running on a pentium 166, I need something efficient. I have cygwin installed, but I'm not sure if perl is installed under this. I'll have to look into it, because K9 is causing the server to have 100% CPU usage permanantly.
 
I'll have to look again at spamassassin. I didn't realise it did bayesian (which has proved most reliable for me).
The great thing about it is that it is almost totally customisable. You can choose exacly what filters it uses, and even how it gives awards the points for all the filters, and phrases.

Individual users can also set up and amend thier own user preferences as well.
 
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I`ve heard of people combining this with Tagged Message Delivery Agent (TMDA) - http://tmda.net/index.html - to get even less spam. TMDA has some nice features -


* whitelists: accept mail from known, trusted senders.

* blacklists: refuse mail from undesired senders.

* challenge/response: allows unknown senders which aren't on the whitelist or blacklist the chance to confirm that their message is legitimate (non-spam).

* tagged addresses: special-purpose e-mail addresses such as time-dependent addresses i.e. they`re only valid for a certain time period, or addresses which only accept certain kinds of communication. These increase the transparency of TMDA for unknown senders by allowing them to safely circumvent the challenge/response system.

I like the "tagged address" options best of all - more info. on the site. There is also a web based user interface so people can manage their options - TMDA-cgi - http://tmda.net/tmda-cgi .

It`s probably just my old version of Mozilla but some of the links on the page don`t seem to load even though they are valid - I had to open them in a new window (tab - on Mozilla).

Hope this is of some interest to you. :)
 
Nice - I'd heard good things about it, but didn't realise it was that powerful.

Unfortunately, I'm tied up with these annoying things they call assignments, I got two of them to be handed in on monday. So it'll be Tuesday before I get a chance to play with anything...
 
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