I have same spam problem in mail3 and mail5 domains. It is terrible!!
I went from 1-2 spams per day to 30-50. And they are raunchy porn spam. I even upped my SA to aggressive and no change. I ended up buying a client spam program.
The issue has nothing to do with mail3.. The issue has everything to do with the fact that amount of spam hitting all hosts and all servers has dramatically increased.
Open source solutions such as spam assasin simply don’t have fast-changing rulesets to combat this threat.
We are looking at potentially implementing a commercial spam filtering service. All I can say is that we are very close. I do strongly recommend customers do consider commercial services of their own as well because these companies have entire teams of people updating rules by the minute. open source solutions don’t.
Most commercial spam solutions charge per mail box. There lies the major issue on why we haven’t been able to so far use a commercial system, as we’d have to pass the cost down to the customer.
Presumably you’d be allowed to make a profit while you’re at it 
There would seem to be enough people having majr problems with it these days that they’d be willing to pay for it as an add-on.
I had some success a few years ago with MX Logic’s service. It worked pretty well, though I didn’t get much spam at the time.
We’ve been using postini to filter jodohost.com. And in the last 6 months we’ve been using it, I’ve not seen a single spam email in my mail box. That’s how good these systems are
But yes we are paying over $160/mo for our over 80 mail boxes. So its not cheap. I’ve been talking to postini sales managers to try get the per mail box pricing to something I think our customers would like, but they won’t go there even with a large mail box commitment (I’ve talked to them for over 10,000 mail boxes)
We recently switched jodohost.com to another commercial solution, that is pretty effective (i get a spam email once in a few days or a week) but not as good as postini. we are considering this solution right now to make available to our clients
Are the spammers using technology that learns how the spam is filtered, on a given server, and adjusts spamming strategy? If so, the ability of their software to learn would be greatly reduced if the modified headers were never available for evaluation. This, of course, all depends on a valid return path somewhere, allowing the filtered message to make it back to the spammer…or perhaps, back to software located somewhere other than the spam’s original source… Just thinking in text…
Can you at least banned this freaking word, if I get one more E-mail with this subject X( . This has been used for a very long time.
VmlAGRA
Re: VIgAGRA anyone?
Man, this just sucks. After a critical business email sent before I left the office for the morning is bounced by the local ISP this AM due to us being on spamcop AGAIN, I get four “Get out of the ob~ese crowd” SPAMS within a microsecond of one another. Brilliant, Just Brilliant…
I know you’re doing the best you can against nearly impossible odds, Yash…These spammers should all be taken out and summarily executed with all due prejudice…
The spamming issue for mail5 has been taken care of and we are out of the listing. Sorry for the problem. It was a reseller giving out free account to play.
i am a reseller and have been doing hosting for several years. yes, in the past year or so, i have had a TON of customers complain about spam. (i switched to jodohost about 3 months ago) so to their credit, it isnt all their fault. my solution for myself, was to forward ALL of my personal email addresses to my gmail account which has GREAT spam protection, however, i realize this is NOT a viable solution for ALL of my clients. i have tried changing the spam settings, etc, but i still cant find a “perfect” solution, and i know that there isnt a PERFECT solution. BUT, if you go to dnsreport.com and type in your domain that is on jodohost, it will give you a WARNING that says:
“WARN SPF record Your domain does not have an SPF record. This means that spammers can easily send out E-mail that looks like it came from your domain, which can make your domain look bad (if the recipient thinks you really sent it), and can cost you money (when people complain to you, rather than the spammer). You may want to add an SPF record ASAP, as 01 Oct 2004 was the target date for domains to have SPF records in place (Hotmail, for example, started checking SPF records on 01 Oct 2004).”
I dont know much about an SPF record, but do you think it would help if jodohost implemented these. apparently it cant hurt anything, only help…
please advise..
Interesting to note that Spam asassin has an implementation for this…
It appears as well that you can simply add a DNS txt record in the H-Sphere CP DNS configuration page to implement this for a given domain…
The wizard looks like it will basically write the txt record for you…
If this is something that we can do without complication, I’d willingly go through each and every domain and enter the appropriate records. I’ll keep my eyes on this thread for a response from the JH folks…
thanks for the reply, and interesting post. i am wondering though if i enable this…will it now allow me to send mail from my gmail account “on behalf” of my other email accounts. for instance, all of my personal email accounts are forwarded to my gmail, but from gmail, i can send from any of these accounts. if this is enabled, i have a feeling i will no longer be able to do this. damn spammers, they have to make life complicated for everyone…
I’d be willing to wager a small bet that you would not be able to send via your gmail account…
Rather than Gmail as an anti-spam filter, you may wish to consider Spambayes. Free, effective and did I mention that it’s free?
i will check into that software, but for me, i dont think that would work since i use gmail as a webmail only and not a pop3 client. im pretty sure google wont let me install that program on their servers but for my other clients, i will check it out. thanks for the tip!
fellow resellers, i know that you guys are probably getting swamped with questions about spam, just like i am…well, tonight i wrote an email to a client trying my best to explain the whole spam situation to them (thank you hafa for the spambayes link). Feel free to share a letter similar to this with your clients if you wish. if you feel that there is something i should add, please let me know so that i can help better assist my clients as well.
Dear CLIENT
In regards to the spam situation going on… in the past year or so, i have noticed that spam in general going around the internet has increased 10x at least. Spammers have gotten “smarter” and are always finding ways to bypass the checks built in to spam filters making life a pain for everyone. We have the most current and the most reliable server-side spam protection system enabled on our servers but sometimes that isnt enough.
As of right now, i have your server-side spam filtering set to “normal”. The other options for this are “aggressive, very aggressive, (normal), relaxed, and passive” fairly self explanatory. If it determines an email as spam, then it goes to the second option which right now i have set as “Mark as Spam”. This option puts a SPAM prefix on each email. The other options for this are to “remove” which deletes the email without you even seeing it, or “move to mailbox” which will move the spam emails to a designated email account.
Client-side spam filtering (a program installed on your computer) is always a good idea in addition to the server-side filtering. There are two programs that i know of that are free, that add-on to outlook (and other clients) that do a GREAT job in spam filtering. The first one, and one that i have used for a few years with great success is called spamihilitator “Error 404 - Not found”. The other one, which was brought to my attention this week, and is supposed to be very good as well (but i have not tested personally) is SpamBayes “http://spambayes.sourceforge.net/”
I would suggest that if you are still having problems with spam, that you install one of these two programs on your computer (not both). Keep in mind that these client side programs will only work if you are using an email client like outlook, outlook express, thunderbird, eudora, etc, and will not work with webmail. Between the server side AND client side spam filtering, it should make the spam virtually invisible with just a little bit of “training”.
If you need help setting up either Spamihilator or SpamBayes, i can walk you through that free of charge since you guys are a hosting client of mine.
A lot of people ask me how i deal with spam personally. My personal solution against spam is this…i have several personal email accounts, <my 1st email address>,<my 2nd email address>,<my 3rd email address> and more. I have every single one of my email accounts setup to automatically forward to my google mail (Gmail) account . This is nice because all of my emails come in to one place, i can check it from anywhere in the world, i get almost 3GB of storage space, its free, GREAT spam protection, and the best part of all is that i can send FROM any of my email accounts all from inside gmail. I would also like to mention that gmail’s “labeling” system is superior to the classic “folder” system of webmail and email clients. Google also has a calendar which has freed me from using outlook completely. (Google is currently testing out a free online word processor and spreadsheet program too, all free). its definitely worth trying out. If you want an invitation to sign up for gmail, just let me know and i will send you one.
I hope this all makes sense, if not, please let me know of any questions you have and i will be more than happy to answer them.
Thank you,
Chris Kirby"
My customers could give a flying rat’s a.. about explanations, etc. They just don’t want TONS AND TONS of spam. What is the problem here???
My settings are set at VERY AGGRESSIVE, and I’m getting sh.t with viagra in the freaking subject line…give me a freaking break!!!
This is UNACCEPTABLE…z
well, this particular customer ASKED for an explanation but thank you for your concern. and also, if i set mine at very aggressive, about half of my good emails get marked as spam. do as you wish, and good luck with it.
That’s why you have a spam folder, and a white list…
Lately it’s not even marking them as SPAM…unfreakingbelievable…
PS. Maybe you could mark them as spam if THESE WORDS are in the subject line…Just a sampling of TODAY’s SPAM with VERY AGGRESSIVE SETTINGS:
Pussy
horny
sex
sale
pornstar
hole
lesbian
dick
anal sex
spreading wide
etc etc etc