Spammers

Ahhh spammers.  I need to write about something so I'll write about spammers.  Spammers cause headaches.  They confuse people.  Make people mad.  Etc.  What you might not think of is that they make money by spamming, odds are they can make a lot of money.  I do not know this from experience mind you. 

Why spam?

Lets say a spammer sends out 250,000 emails.  Say 100,000 email addresses are good addresses.  Say 10,000 people by the dumb product from the spam.  Say the product profits the spammer $10.00 for each purchase.  That is $100,000.00.  $100,000 for doing almost nothing.  That is why there is such a thing as spammers, well probably not the only reason.  Another reason is to motivate penny stock.  Other reasons too.

How do you combat it?

• Do not respond to spam
• Keep your email address fairly private
• Do not post it on the internet (little programs go and fetch your email address really easy).  A good way arond this is to use a web page form to submit an email vs. having your actual email address posted.
• Use something like this billy at planetgeek dot biz to keep the bots from getting it.  Who knows maybe the bots can figure this out by now.
• Do not open spam
• Do not spam.  No one really likes or cares about the funny little emails that you send out.  "Top 10 reasons....."  "Funny Signs....."
• Do not send out emails like "Send this to 10 people or you will be doomed."  "Jesus himself will curse you if you do not send this".  Those are fake and are ploys.
• These are just a few things.  You can search and get a lot more.

How I deal with it for 70 people

Here at work I have used a few different systems.  The one that I will talk about and mention is called MailScanner, http://www.mailscanner.info/.  This is a free opensource linux based solution.  This takes some knowledge about linus to get it going.  If you want it to be easy there is a company called Fort Systems, http://www.fsl.com/ that will support it for you.  If you want a great solution go with this.

Most spam filters are similar in function and in terminology.  They all have things such as whitelist, blacklist, and rulesets.  There are many things that go into a spam filter.  Even thought I will be talking about MailScanner most of what I say about it applies to other filters.

Here is how it works.

• Someone sends you an email
• That email gets pointed to somewhere, this case it is MailScanner
• MailScanner processes the email.  Doing virus checks, running each email through hundreds of spam test.  Gets a score and bases on the score it is either tagged as spam or not.  Other things happen here too.  This part of the process is usually called a gateway.  This server just checks your email and fowards it to your Microsoft Exchange server, Lotus Notes, whatever.  This way, all of the email gets processed before it evens gets to your email server.
• MailScanner routes the email to the email server, in my case it is a Microsoft Exchange 2007 server.  Microsoft Exchange 2007 has some spam functions too, but spam filtering is better left to another server like above.

• Then the email server handles it from there.