One of the most annoying things about using e-mail is spam. This unwanted communication affects everyone who uses e-mail. Spam has many definitions and can come in many forms, shapes and sizes. In some cases one persons spam is another persons treasure (and in some cases livelihood). Spam has to be eliminated otherwise the Internet will suffer.
To give some idea on the amount of spam out there, Utopia’s email servers processed 700,000 email messages over the holiday period. Of this, 71% were tagged as spam. Without our current anti-spam technology there would have been around 500,000 unwanted email messages delivered to mailboxes.
Utopia uses a range of technology to fight spam. Our overall goal is to limit the amount of spam that gets delivered into your mailbox using these techniques:
- POP-Before-SMTP– This means you cannot send email through our servers unless you have come in and picked up email from us already during your internet connection. This stops spammers using our servers to send spam.
- Spam Assassin– This is one of the worlds most popular anti-spam tools. It filters email and uses a scoring system to decide if a message is spam or not. Spam is deleted straight away.
- Spam databases – We subscribe to systems which track computers that are known to send spam. The email from these computers is deleted also.
Fighting spam also requires some understanding from you, the customer, on how spam works and how you can also fight it. Here are some things you should keep in mind when managing your email:
- Do not submit your websites to FFA’s (free for all sites) unless you want 70 pieces of spam in your e-mail on a daily basis
- Make sure you do not have a catchall on your email. e.g. anything@yourdomain.co.nz goes to your mailbox
- Do not reply to spammers
- Never buy anything advertised in spam
- Never use “remove” options in a spam
- Distrust everything from people you do not know
From time to time our anti-spam systems report messages back to you when you are sending e-mail.
These messages can be acted on as follows:
- “Please pickup your email before sending” – Our email server believes you have not yet logged on to pickup your email from us. If you have it may be that you disconnected from the internet before sending your email.
- Simple stay connected while picking up and sending email and this message should not appear.
- “Blocked by Spam Assassin” – Using a variety of spam checking methods our servers have tagged your computer and internet connection has having sent spam in the past. Simple disconnecting from the Internet, waiting a few moments, and reconnecting should resolve this message.