Dog Community

Webmasters, please help....

Posted : 2/25/2008 9:45:45 AM

How do my fellow webmasters deal with e-mail spam? I just took over the site for the dog training club I belong to. It was previously maintained by a friend of the owner, on his own servers. I'm too lazy to deal with my own hosting, so I use a hosting provider. Anyway, I've setup all the e-mail accounts, but we're already getting spammed. My cPanel comes with a package called Spam Assassin, so I've enabled this. Does anyone have experience with that program? Would it be more wise to purchase and install something else? I've never bothered with it before, because I have my webmaster accounts forward to my other account, which has plenty of it's own firewalls. However, the owner uses Outlook for all of her accounts so I guess she has no protection (I'm not really sure how Outlook works, I use something else).

boneyjean

Posted : 2/25/2008 10:42:33 AM

I am not sure if this is the kind of info you are looking for b/c I am not the webmaster...just the person that works in the office that ends up coordinating all of the computer maintenance and I have a decent enough understanding of the basics.

We host our own email and use Outlook to view and sort it all. We were getting tons of Spam. A couple years ago the people who we consult with on our computers suggested GFI Mail Essentials. I think that is the name. I know it is GFI something. It does a great job of keep our spam out of our inbox. You have to teach it a little at first but I hardly ever get anything unwanted in my inbox anymore. I keep a folder for my inbox as well as unread mail in my favorite folders in Outlook and that way I can glance through the unread mail folder where the spam mail goes daily but it isn't dirtying up my inbox. Not sure what sort of budget they have but I know it was under $500 and I have no idea if it mattered how many people were using it or what.

cyclefiend2000

Posted : 2/25/2008 3:40:46 PM

for outlook 2003 (and maybe older versions, but no newer) there is a program called matador. it is a tiny little add-on to outlook (will add a toolbar) and it seems very effective for sending spam to the spam folder. sometimes it will get good mail but not usually and never twice. it uses a baesyan filter (similar to spam assasin i think).

however, spam assassin should get the majority of the stuff before it reaches your inbox.

edit: the new outlook (2007) comes with a filter similar to matador. so it should be good straight away.

http://www.snapfiles.com/get/matador.html

edit2: one guy i know is sending a number of his clients through google apps http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/index.html

not sure what it provides other than filtering of the email.

Liesje

Posted : 2/25/2008 6:17:41 PM

Thanks, I'll suggest those Outlook tools to her. I've enabled the Spam Assassin and will tweak the score accordingly. I also added scripts to my pages that make mailto links unspamable by the spam bots. I asked her to watch her account and let me know if it gets better or worse. I have the webmaster account and there are mailto links for me on more pages than her account. I haven't got a single spam message from that account yet.

I'm a computer technician so I'm pretty familiar with how these things work, I just don't have a wide knowledge of products. We use Novell products so GroupWise is our mail program (Outlook does not work with our security configuration). We use Barracuda's spam firewall, which works amazingly well (once you train it), but we're not going to spend hundreds on something that's only for a handful of e-mail accounts.