HK based SMTP / Spam / Mail Filtering

[MrMoo]

Why do we need to get a white listing? We are not black listed so, they will apply their rate limiting analysis to our traffic and work out that we are sending good email.

Ok so you are OK, but I have an IP in corporate hosting which isn't black listed but always gets sent to spam/trash in AOL, Hotmail, Earthlink, Yahoo, and Optimum Online. What do I do?

White listing the big providers is a big mistake a sure way to let spam into your servers.

So I have a 500 employee company, apart from a few the majority of our wholesale clients use free email providers. If the big providers are not white listed we will get no email from them and go out of business. The world is moving to the internet for sales and purchasing, its no longer feasible for many small companies to attend shows, order mail catalogues and order over the phone. That makes it a non-option to not white list.

[KnowItAll]

If you have a copy that "got trashed" by Hotmail / Gmail etc, save it with the headers on a machine with spamassassin on it and follow this ..

http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/TestingInstallation

[hk.com]

Ok so you are OK, but I have an IP in corporate hosting which isn't black listed but always gets sent to spam/trash in AOL, Hotmail, Earthlink, Yahoo, and Optimum Online. What do I do?

The question is why your email is going to the trash on those providers? Is it bulk generated? is it junk, what is the behaviour of your users?

In the same way, you have to keep an eye on what your users are doing to make sure your servers are good net citizens. We don't many of our customers relay out through us, or should I say not many subscribe to our SMTP relaying service. We encourage (or force them) to use their ISPs relays.

So I have a 500 employee company, apart from a few the majority of our wholesale clients use free email providers. If the big providers are not white listed we will get no email from them and go out of business. The world is moving to the internet for sales and purchasing, its no longer feasible for many small companies to attend shows, order mail catalogues and order over the phone. That makes it a non-option to not white list.

Whitelisting a mail provider only means you will eat more spam. We don't whitelist any provider, and I don't expect the same.

We use ultra conservative, dynamic black listing, which work on behaviour, not RBL's nor heuristics. Basically no one is permanently blacklisted or whitelisted. One of the most important features we have is our anti address harvesting methods. It greatly slows down the rate spam increases for user mail boxes.

Recently at most we tag some email and then we let our corporate users decide what to do with that. They can process their email on the server with our web based procmail like rule engine, or they can process the tagging on their PC mail client. We are not here to play god with peoples emails, as to what has to be deleted. The fact we don't screw around with people email and we pretty much never go down we an average corporate retention rate over the past 6 years of 98%.

In business it is better to get some junk that lose valuable email. Of course there has a to be a balance to this. The mail box can't control the productivity of a person, so they can administer their own spam filters and take responsbility for their mail.

To me, it sounds like the software you are using is what is forcing your views as to what has to be done. Sounds like you use spam assasin and for me even for single users it does not cut it.

We are now enabling SIP/IM/VoIP/Video and IP-PBX on all our mail services (no using Asterisk) so that people can run their own private Skype network per domain, and that does worry in terms of VoIP spam. No clues as to how to handle that.

[MrMoo]

The question is why your email is going to the trash on those providers? Is it bulk generated? is it junk, what is the behaviour of your users?

We have very limited, less than 100 US emails per week, no bulk emailing, no lists, and from an online store maybe 10 automated emails per week. We get through gmail filters fine.

To me, it sounds like the software you are using is what is forcing your views as to what has to be done. Sounds like you use spam assasin and for me even for single users it does not cut it.

In the absense of other resources and terms I use what is available. I might not have ultra conservative filters but this month they have remove 1 spam email out of 13 emails per 2 hour period, other mail is forwarded to the client but tagged with a score so Thunderbird can highlight it as possible spam. Each client has spam & ham folders so they can help train the bayesian filter if mistakes occur.

[Petesy]

Most small to medium ISPs in the US have decided that their users will not communicate with people in Asia, and subsequently blocked IP ranges assigned to Asian countries. If they are nice they will bounce your mail and tell you "your country is blocked", if not they'll just blackhole it. The idiots will even drop mail sent to their postmaster address.

They won't address the issue until your recipient threatens to switch ISP.

If you can send mail to these domains through your ISP's SMTP servers, either your ISP have already done the kicking and screaming for you, or they have their own mail relays in the US that don't get blocked.

Most large ISPs will bounce mail if they can't reverse lookup the IP address of your SMTP server.

And yet still more reliable than many ISP or internal hosts, the biggest advantage is that most companies will specifically configure their filtering to allow mail from the big free email providers.

I know for a fact that Toyota's mail server specifically blocks all mail from Yahoo and Hotmail.

A lot of companies actually block the free e-mail providers for fear of mail abuse by their internal users.