All our hosting clients are protected from spam by our relationship with SpamExperts, and their system is quite good indeed. However, even the best system occasionally allows spam through, and this article will help you to report any email that you think is spam directly to SpamExperts. This will allow SpamExperts to analyse the email, determine the reasons that it escaped their notice and adjust their filter to better protect you.

In the Spampanel web interface we have a “Report Spam” function. You can upload a spam message to train the spamfilter. It is in a ‘drag ‘n’ drop’ style feature meaning you can save the SPAM email to your system, then drag and drop the email into the “Report Spam” area. Currently only the .eml format is supported.

For .msg format you can use the free “Outlook Email client add-on” to report spam which was not correctly blocked by the SpamExperts systems. More information about these can be found here.

If you’re using Thunderbird you can also use the free “Mozilla Thunderbird client addon“. More information about this addon can be found here.

If your email client is not supported, it is possible to report spam by forwarding the spam email(s) as attachment to a special address spamreport@spamrl.com. All messages attached in .eml format will be processed by this system.

Now that all our client’s email goes through SpamExperts for filtering, all clients also have a spam quarantine folder. While all users get a daily spam digest, you may want to access your spam filter more frequently than the daily spam report allows for. In those cases, you can always access your spam filter directly at spamexperts.nerdsisp.com.

If this is the first time you’ve accessed your SpamExperts quarantine folder, you will not have a password setup. Click on the ‘Retrieve log-in link’ and type in your email address. A temporary login link will be immediately emailed to you so that you can setup your password for the first time.

SpamExperts Quarantine Login Page

Understandably, people are concerned and frustrated when they start receiving e-mail from people they know (or don’t know) asking why they are being sent junk mail. In some cases, the junk mail contains malicious attachments, or links to malicious websites that can contain viruses.

Why does this happen? Usually it’s because their email address somehow go on to a spammer’s list, and the spammer just happened to pick their email address that week. Spammers aren’t going to use their own email address to send out junk, because they don’t want it traced back to them, so they “spoof” someone’s email address, making it seem like the junk email is coming from them instead.

Once that starts happening, it’s nearly impossible to stop it until the spammer moves on to another email address in their list. In the meantime, recipients can create rules or filters to block certain keywords or move them to certain folders automatically until their friend’s email address is no longer being spoofed.

Taking proactive steps is the best approach, though. Guard your email address. Don’t give it out to just anyone, or to any website. Many of those websites say they won’t sell your information, but in some cases the spammers still end up getting the information.

If you sign up for something online, such as a newsletter, have an email account specifically setup to only receive those emails, and use another email account for correspondence with people you know. That way if the other account is compromised or spoofed, it won’t affect your important emails, or annoy your contacts.

Many junk and scam emails appear to come from legitimate sources, but in fact do not. This is an example of an email address used in a scam. The email address in quotes is what appears to the user. The email address in brackets is what the email address really points to. This may be visible when the user attempts to reply to the email.

You can find more examples of scams here.

We’ve all seen Chain Letter emails, with jokes and whatnot. They may be funny (or not), but it’s all of the email addresses in the “to” or “cc” fields that’s is the larger concern. Who knows where that email originally came from, or where it’ll end up eventually, which is likely on a spammer’s list. All those email addresses are gold mines from spammer’s. If someone is sending you those kind of emails, and you want to receive them, insist them use the ‘bcc” (blind carbon copy) field instead, so each recipient can’t see anyone else’s email address.

Be sure to take precautions when it comes to who you give your email address out to, and the emails you open or click links in. They can be very persuasive, and in some cases appear very realistic. If you’re suspicious of an email, contact your Nerd.

One of the largest botnets on the Internet today, Rustock has been the target of a coordinated takedown effort. This effort appears to have paid off as Rustock has gone from sending about 2,000 spam emails per second to virtually none in the last 12 hours. The CBL estimates that over 815,000 Windows computers are infected with the Rustock malware package. As Rustock was one of the very largest sources of email spam, this development is extremely good news for all users of the Internet.

Read full article from Krebson Security…

What is ID Protect?
ID Protect is a service that hides your private information from being displayed publicly in a global database that is frequently used by spammers and data miners to bombard unprotected people with unsolicited advertisements and scams.
ID Protect can be used on any domain registration from one of the following TLDs: COM, NET, ORG, INFO, BIZ, PRO, TV, CC, ME, ASIA, CM

Why is it necessary to add ID Protect to every domain I register?
Every domain registration is required to have accurate contact information (WHOIS data) associated with it. Data miners crawl the public WHOIS database for this information and sell it to marketing firms and advertising agencies, which can result in both spam and junk mail to your home. ID Protect hides your accurate contact information and stores it in a secure location, protecting your personal information without risking the suspension of the domain’s registration.

How does it work?
ID Protect takes your unprotected, personal information and shields it from the public so that they only see the anonymous information:

What are the benefits of ID Protect?
Other WHOIS masking products only falsify your WHOIS records which can jeopardize your domain registration. ID Protect secures your private information by storing it in a trusted 3rd party data vault, and is completely complaint with ICANN (ICANN is the governing body of Internet rules and regulations).
ID Protect forwards legitimate emails to your real email address, but keeps spammers and data miners away.

Without ID Protect, anyone can find your personal contact information including your home address. ID Protect hides this information while protecting your personal address from getting into the wrong hands.

Spam is the bane of any business, clogging up your mailboxes and reducing employees’ productivity. Nerds On Site works hard every day to improve your profitability, productivity and pleasure. One way is to reduce the amount of spam you get to nothing.

Effective out-of-the-box 97% spam protection is achieved with SmarterMail’s structured, multi-layer spam prevention strategy. The antispam server technologies allow for customized levels of protection and flexible configurations using a variety of methods, including greylisting, SPF, DomainKeys/DKIM, Bayesian filtering, reverse DNS, RBL, blacklist/whitelist, SMTP blocking, custom headers, and per-user spam weighting.

One of the great advantages of hosting with Nerds On Site is the customized spam filtering just for your business. Our default spam filtering is pretty good, but if your business has special needs, or the default settings aren’t cutting it for you, contact our team and we’ll work out a custom solution just for you!

Contact our team today to learn how we can reduce your daily intake of spam!

One of the latest techniques in fighting spam is domain-based reputation systems, something that Nerds On Site has integrated into our systems over 2 years ago already. However, the buzz around domain-based reputation has increased significantly, with major ISPs such as Yahoo, Gmail and AOL adding such protection to their spam filters. In brief, every domain-based reputation is a little different from other anti-spam techniques for two reasons.

First, domain reputation is inheritably a positive approach to anti-spam. It is, in a way, much like getting a signed letter of recommendation when visiting a stranger, something that positively proves that you are who you say you are. The technique for this is something called ‘DomainKeys Indentified Mail’. Essentially, your hosting companies sets up your domain to automatically digitally sign every single email address you send as being certifiably from the real you. Thus, when your email arrives at a mail server that supports domain-based reputation in their anti-spam systems, your email will have the greatest chance of passing the filters, since it has been cryptographically authenticated as having come from the real you, and not a spoofer.

Second, domain reputation is independent from IP addresses. In the shared hosting world, many hundreds or even thousands of domain can share one IP address. That means that just one of the clients on the same mail server as you needs to send out spam, thus ruining the IP reputation of the entire mail server, and thus of all the domain on the mail server. A domain-based reputation eliminates this problem, making the spam filtering more granular and specific.

According to WatchGuard’s Reputation Authority, the domain-based reputation score for Nerds On Site is perfect, which is a rating that we strive to maintain. This does not mean that all our client’s automatically attain the same status, but it proves to our clients the diligence we take in maintaining and securing our mail servers, something that will immediately lend itself to your own domain reputation if you host with us.

In his annual email predictions blog entry for 2010 (http://nosurl.com/9c), Matt Blumberg has predicted a sharp increase in the amount of email traffic that will flow across the Internet in the upcoming year. Every year more and more pundits declare the death of email, but they couldn’t be more wrong. According to email-marketing-reports.com, 247 billion emails are sent every single day. Many people will point to the incredible rise and growth of social media, but fail to realize that these services generally rely on email for notifications and alerts. Thus, as social media continues to grow and integrate into an increasing array of business activities, it falls to email to continue to hold it all together and provide a single point of contact. The marketing companies certainly believe this trend, and that is why marketing experts are predicting a strong growth in email marketing.

What this all means for the average business person is a sharp increase in email being sent to their inbox, and a steadily growing percentage of it will be spam. That is why it is increasingly important to ensure your email is being handled by a hosting company that provides for three things:

• Unlimited email traffic
• Unlimited email storage
• Adaptive spam protection

Our clients can look to Nerds On Site for exactly this and more, with over 6 layers of spam filtering and protection and hosted Exchange services for even the most demanding of office environments.