Fixing the Excessive "Regular" Spam Problem

Last week we decided to do something about this by somehow blocking the spam at our web host's server. After all, we were able to do this for the several thousand bounced email messages per day from spammers fraudulently using our email addresses as from/return addresses on their spam. Fortunately, our web host allows multiple mailboxes for our domain, uses SpamAssassin for filtering on their servers and allows recipes for managing mailboxes on their servers.

First, we changed all of our email addresses on Macs Only! to one, set up a mailbox for it and encoded it with Spam Stopper 1.4.1 and Enkoder 2.0.5. We used both freeware encoding applications to see if one is better than the other--so far both are perfect. Then we picked one of our old email addresses to be the repository for messages to be discarded. By forwarding all messages from the old addresses (and any others to our domain) to the one with the discard recipe, all messages get discarded except those to the new email address and to one of our old ones that we have used as our personal email address. The latter gets a lot of spam but we still need it. By using SpamAssassin with an aggressive setting on this one mailbox and sending identified junk mail to the trash, only a handful of spam gets through to be downloaded and most of them are picked up by X Mail's Junk filter.

By taking these steps, our 600+ spam per day has been reduced to less than 10--at least for now. Anyone who has an oppressive amount of spam, especially those with dial-up connections and who want to download their messages, might want to contact their ISP to see if they can set up a similar on-server filtering process.