[BlueOnyx:06518] Re: OWM and Spam

[Robert Fitzpatrick]

On 2/15/2011 10:31 AM, Darrell D. Mobley wrote:
> It seems no where you turn in web hosting these days, we are much like the
> hometown hardware stores trying to compete against the Lowes and Home Depots
> of the world, getting priced out of the market.  In this specific situation,
> it involves one client that was hosted on Network Solutions who used their
> webmail to do all their email needs.  Like Gmail, NS can afford to throw a
> lot of resources at spam.
> 
> I am probably going to tell this guy to set up Outlook Express and let his
> AVG software handle the junk.  The amount of time I have spent with this
> client and his email compared to the free first month, free setup, then
> $4.95/month, has put me at about a 10000% loss on this account compared to
> others.

But once you have a system of rejecting spam, you won't have this with
the next account. We abandoned any kind of spam processing on the Cobalt
servers way back when they were Cobalt due to the processing required as
discussed in this thread. I'm sure today's solutions are much better,
but our setup gained us another great revenue. Originally intended to
just relieve spam from the mail servers, it is now a growing percentage
of our revenue blocking spam and viruses for company mail servers
located in their own offices.

We setup a gateway in front of the servers using Postfix+Maia using SA
and ClamAV for scanning for spam and viruses. Maia Mailguard is an
amavisd spin-off that has a GUI where people can manage their
blacklists/whitelists, train messages against the SA bayes system and
get digest email messages periodically like Postini with their blocked
caches where they can click to release/whitelist. After scanning,
Postfix just transports the message on to the mail server based on
domain, whether it be our mail server or the customers. Customers
absolutely love it. Actually, these gateways are now offering Smarthost
services as well for those company mail servers to send out so they
don't have to worry about tainted/dynamic IP's or other blocks.

--Robert
--
Robert <robert at webtent.org>