DSPAM Implementation

[Yash]

Dear Customers,

In the last two days, we have put Mail5 and Mail6 live on our new anti-spam system. We have seen a drastic decrease in spam on both these servers and attribute this to our new system.

We have also been receiving complaints of some legitimate emails being classed as spam. These legitimate emails are mainly newsletters or commercial emailing that come within the grey area of spam detection, and are many times classed as spam by many spam filtering systems (no system is perfect). We request customers to whitelist any such emails in H-Sphere to avoid them being marked as spam. Additionally, if you wish to view all email that is being marked as spam, you can do so by creating a mail box and configuring H-Sphere (via mail settings) to redirect all spam to that mail box.

We have also implemented a feature called residential IP greylisting. That means all email coming from servers on residential IPs will automatically be rejected for about 5 minutes. If the server tries to reconnect to send its mail, it would be accepted. Since most spam is coming from hacked residential computers, this has drastically reduced mail volume. Any good mail software running on a residential machine however should try reconnecting, so legitimate email should continue to come in.

The remaining mail servers will slowly be switched to the new system within the next two weeks. If you have any questions regarding the system, please use our support forum. We request customers send complaints about the new system via tickets, as it will better allow us to help and track the volume and nature of complaints

 

[Yash]

Let me clarify how the new system works:

1) If an incoming email is coming from a mail server that is on SpamCOP, SpamHAUS or is a residential IP, it will be rejected on session with a message sent back to the sender (this message appears to be spam). This is the only form of outright reject incoming mail receives. Most email providers outright reject email listed with major blacklists

2) If the mail server is not flagged, email will come in, and be analysed by DSPAM. If DSPAM thinks it is spam, it will mark it as spam and be passed to your mail server. You can control what happens to this spam message by changing settings in HSphere (either quarantining it or deleting it).

There are a few reported issues with DSPAM we are looking at. But overall, we have seen a huge reduction in spam

 

[Yash]

We are moving Mail5 off DSPAM back to its original configuration, in the next 5 minutes. We are doing so because we have identified an issue that was causing some email to sporadically be bounced back to the sender (loopback error). Once we fix this issue, we will put Mail5 back on DSPAM

 

[Yash]

We've moved back Mail5 to using DSPAM. We have corrected the loopback error that was occuring.

Please report any complaints or issues regarding DSPAM via the ticket system so we can track the volume and nature of the issues

 

[Yash]

I'd like to reiterate that you can view all email that is classed as spam by creating a mailbox in HSphere and configuring Hsphere to move spam to that mail box.

Dspam is currently running on mail5 and mail6. As said before, we are using residential IP grey listing. If a client or domain of your's receives alot of email from IPs on residential networks (something which shouldn't be the case) they will notice a 10 to 30 minute delay in their email being received. If this is a problem for you, you can submit a ticket to have yourself removed from DSPAM.

Additionally, DSPAM outright bounces emails from servers flagged for heavy spam by SpamCOP and SpamHAUS. The senders are notified in this case, and you do not receive the email sent (even if you have quarantine enabled). If you receive alot of email from flagged mail servers, you once again can request to be removed from the dspam system by submitting a ticket.

We have so far had tremendous success with dspam. It has reduced spam significantly on both mail5 and mail6, and the false positives have been very low.