What Can I Do About Spam?

SPAM e-mails are becoming a serious problem for just about all our clients. Some are getting hundreds of spam messages a day and it wastes time for them having to go through them manually to filter out the genuine messages from the junk.

We offer a filtering service to our clients who host their web sites and e-mail with us which filters out a varying percentage of SPAM.

It works in 3 ways:

1. It can deliver the message and change the subject to 'SPAM' so that you can set up a rule in your mail program to direct it to a new folder.
2. We can set up a mailbox specifically for any SPAM with webmail access that you can check on a daily or weekly basis
3. If you are absolutely confident that no genuine messages are being flagged then we can just tell the server to delete anything that it detects

Option 1 is good when you first start as you have total visibility of messages and will quickly see any false positives. Option 2 is good when you are comfortable that few genuine messages are being picked up. Option 3 means that you have to be 100% confident with the filtering and is only advisable in a few cases.

We can set the sensitivity of the filter so that it will pick up more or less SPAM but it is a case of starting with a low sensivity and making it more sensitive as time goes by until it is picking up an optimum amount. It is unlikely that it will pick up everything but feedback that we've had shows it picking up between 40% and 80% of SPAM messages. Feedback also shows a very low number of false positives.

The cost of the SPAM filtering is a £50 + vat setup fee and then £30 + vat per year. This covers any number of users.