Home
Solutions
Web and Application Hosting
Site Development Services
InfraServer Application Server
Technical Support
Corporate
Login
|
|
what is spam
"Spamming" is the sending of unsolicited email ("spam") for the purpose of marketing a product, deception, congesting networks, or email address harvesting for future spam.
spam prevention techniques
Most mail providers or ISP's have made efforts to reduce or eliminate the amount of spam traversing their networks. Common techniques include the use of real-time "black lists" (lists of IP addresses that are known to send or relay spam) and/or "white lists" (lists of approved IP addresses), or reverse DNS lookups. Some spam prevention techniques involve pattern recognition within the content of the email to try to determine whether it is spam at heart. There are even some products that filter the spam at the last possible opportunity, on the recipient's mail client (unfortunately doing little to prevent the wasting of network resources that were expended to carry the spam to its destination).
All in all, this ethics-stretching and law-bending contingent of the internet costs the internet community much in wasted productivity. Further, spam prevention techniques can limit a user's access to the internet as is common in the workplace. It has the familiar ring of the audacity of the few limiting the rights and freedoms of the many, which we've heard much about post-9/11. And with the advent of the separation between mail provision and internet access provision, email providers are at more of a disadvantage in keeping their users spam-free. In the end, it really should be the ISP's responsibility to aggressively pursue spammers to which they provide connectivity, but that's another story and until then...
imalgam's approach
Alas, Imalgam maintains its own black list of IP addresses, which it created from scratch. We found that use of other lists was too expensive in network resources (DNS lookups delayed or failed frequently) relative to effectiveness (too much of incoming spam would not have been filtered using the external lists). Happily spammers use dumb techniques with no targeting to their marketing (despite their claims in their emails), blindly send to email addresses which are actually spam traps to cull IP addresses for black-listing, and are prone to be repeat offenders or exploit other users unknowingly and repeatedly. The InfraServer can be configured to deny connections from black-listed IP addresses, or gracefully send an SMTP error response.
leveraging Imalgam's spam database for your own mail server
Please contact techsupport@imalgam.net if you are interested in gaining access to Imalgam's IP address black-listing.
Spam me once, shame on you; spam me twice, shame on me.
See also:
mail-abuse.org; osirusoft.com
|