{"id":132,"date":"2006-10-20T12:08:48","date_gmt":"2006-10-20T11:08:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/west-penwith.org.uk\/blog\/archives\/132"},"modified":"2010-05-25T09:31:04","modified_gmt":"2010-05-25T08:31:04","slug":"central-spam-blocking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/west-penwith.org.uk\/blog\/archives\/132","title":{"rendered":"Central Spam Blocking"},"content":{"rendered":"

My hosting company are trialling a central spam blocking option<\/a> on my domain. Actually it is a marketing exercise to get me to buy it but it was interesting enough to accept. It is a reputable system using Barracuda<\/a> which incorporates a rule based algorithmic scoring system with user whitelisting and blacklisting plus, after a while, a Bayesian component. It is all web based and quite easy to use and seems to be effective.
\nThe reason I won’t be continuing after the trial is that I now get as many “quarantine” messages from the system as there used to be spam and I have to read them. The reason is subtle and one that they didn’t think of.
\nOne of the “features” of own-domain email is that you have the potential of a nearly infinite number of email addresses. The hosting people encouraged this by providing a “nobody” facility—a mechanism that sends any mail for which there isn’t a designated box or alias to a single address. I exploit this by giving every (organisation) that I deal with a unique address when I sign up; e.g. for mailing lists, payment accounts etc. That way I can tell if they forward it to “partners” or sell their address list. It has only happened to me once but was useful to prove the case.
\nA side effect of this is that if a spammer does a random name type of attack then I get it all in my inbox, not a huge amount but enough to notice. Unfortunately the new spam block system doesn’t recognise this so opens a quarantine management box for every new address it sees and sends me a summary and a password for it.
\nWhat it ought to do is activate the forwarding rules BEFORE processing the mail, then I would only get one box for the whole lot and it would start to get a significant amount of data for the Bayesian algorithm to kick in—but I can’t convince them of that so I will continue to process my own spam. Popfile<\/a> is good enough and there is no bandwidth problem.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My hosting company are trialling a central spam blocking option on my domain. Actually it is a marketing exercise to get me to buy it but it was interesting enough to accept. It is a reputable system using Barracuda which incorporates a rule based algorithmic scoring system with user whitelisting and blacklisting plus, after a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":239,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-132","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-email","category-technical"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/west-penwith.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/west-penwith.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/west-penwith.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/west-penwith.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/239"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/west-penwith.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=132"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/west-penwith.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1198,"href":"https:\/\/west-penwith.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132\/revisions\/1198"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/west-penwith.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=132"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/west-penwith.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=132"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/west-penwith.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=132"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}