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NO SPAM is actually possible

By admin | December 14, 2007

This post is relevant for everyone.

Yesterdays post was all about reducing the amount of spam that you receive into your mailbox. Spam is such a pervasive problem nowadays that I decided to make todays post on the same topic.


The system we covered yesterday (Spam Assassin) is a rules based system … one that looks at each incoming email and then evaluates it against a set of rules common to spam messages.

While this is a very good way to detect spam, it does suffer from 2 disadvantages …

  1. It can let some spam through.
  2. It can sometimes mark valid email as spam (called “false positives”).

There is a second way to control spam … its called “challenge/response” … and it is pretty much 100% effective against spam.

How it works is this …

  1. An email comes in to your server.
  2. The spam detector looks at the source of the email (the “from” address) and compares it to a user defined white list of sources of permissible email.
  3. If the “from” address is in your white list then the spam detector delivers the email into your inbox ready for you to download.
  4. If the email is from an unknown person (and spam normally comes from people you don’t know) then that email is kept in a temporary location and the spam detector sends an email (the “challenge” part of the challenge/response system) to the person who sent the email requesting that they please click on a link within the “challenge” email. This effectively proves that the sender of the email is a real person, and not some automated mass mailing machine.
  5. If the sender is a real person, and they click on the link in the “challenge” email, then this results in the “response” portion landing back at the spam detector.
  6. The spam detector then delivers the email into your inbox ready for you to download.
  7. You have the option to “blacklist” anybody that sends you mail. This means that the spam detector will then automatically throw away all email from that address, and it never gets to your mail box again.

So, as you can see this challenge/response type system results in a 100% clean mail box.

Very few ISP’s and web hosts offer this type of system though (we don’t).

While there are probably quite a few companies out there now that offer this service, there is only the one that I can recommend … SpamArrest.

This recommendation is based on the personal recommendation from my long time friend Paul Baldi (http://www.baldi.co.za is hosted with us for more than 6 years now). He was getting hammered by spam because his email address was being harvested from his web site. He started using SpamArrest a few years ago and swears by it.

Once you have set it up (easily done via their web page) their server will automatically start fetching all of your email from our server … make sure its not spam by using their challenge/response method … and then deliver it into your inbox.

Their service is cheap, and they offer a complete 30 day free trial.


So, if you are haunted by a lot of junk mail (and the Spam Assassin on our server is not getting rid of most of it) then you may find that this service is exactly what you need.

If anyone has used (or is using) SpamArrest, or any other similar service, then please don’t hesitate to post your own comments on your experiences here.

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