Invision-Graphics

Author: Rob Dee

Controlling my own domain names puts me in an interesting position. All the spam coming into these domain names becomes my personal responsibility, and I learned early on that the default cpanel spam filters generate more than their share of false positives. Prior to getting spamwasher to guard my e-mail I had to manually create filters in outlook to deal with the majority of spam.

As the number of these filters grew I realized I needed a more serious weapon to fight with spam, but if you aren't quite ready to shell out money just yet, or if you'd prefer combat spam with the resources already at your disposal, then the important thing to do is create filters that catch spam, AND ONLY spam. Here' are some of the best ones I used:

Apply this rule after the message arrives Where the Subject line contains 'SPAM' or 'failure notice' or 'delivery failed' or 'undeliverable' or '(Failure)' or 'Undelivered Mail' or 'Returned Mail: see transcript' Delete it

This one was added after I went through an incredible phase of having mail getting bounced back to me. The spammer theory here is a returned message will automatically break through most spam filters, so they send messages to dead addresses using your email address as the reply-to address. When the mail server bounces the message it comes straight through your filters and back to you.

Apply this rule after the message arrives - where the From line contains '@olympic.webitdomainz.com' delete it

This one is fairly specific to me, but is interesting to anyone who uses form-mail. My first attempt at allowing people to contact me directly from the webpage resulted in a mass of spam from spammers exploiting sendmail flaws.

Basically they would send spam automatically through my webmail form. As they never filled in a mail address it would appear to come from my old host(incidently if you are thinking of hosting with these guys - DON'T).

Apply this rule after the message arrives - where the Subject line contains 'STOPSPAMNOW' move it to the STOPSPAMNOW folder

I wasn't sure whether or not to add this one as it does give spammers a little window to attack me with. However it is a good example of how to 'whitelist' a message. You can use a word like 'STOPSPAMNOW' to pick up the STOPSPAMNOW newsletter, you can whitelist based on the senders email address or you can use a combination of both, which is preferable.

Hopefully these few short tips will help you in setting up effective anti spam filters.

About the Author:
With an estimated 70-90 billion spam messages sent every day, the problem is not going away. Don't wait for someone to solve the problem for you, visit The Stop Spam Now Site and review the very best methods of stopping spam.