I know it has been a while since I got down to blogging here, and it really has been quite busy for me, but as it turns out there is a lot a blog can do for you, so I am back. This time I am here to talk about Spam Email Filtering.
As I’m sure many of you already know, spam Emails are the bane of anyone’s life who checks their Emails regularly. I may not mention it here but I have almost a dozen different Email accounts by now and though most of them do route to my primary Gmail account, which makes things so much easier, I still have some which I handle myself and that means dealing with spam emails and having to filter them.
In case you don’t know, spam Emails are a way to make money these days. Perfectly normal companies are never happy with how much money they make so they are always looking for ways to get advertising out to ever more people and some even resort to paying for spam Email services. This means that they pay someone to figure out what your Email address(es) is/are and send you their advertising Emails in a way that will not be blocked. Technically this is considered hacking but because it pays the bills, no one wants to call it that.
As annoying as the advertisements are, they are still not as bad as those random spam Emails that come from real hackers trying to steal your information, push you to a phishing site, or infect your computer system with something malicious. I’ll get into Malware in a later blog, promise.
This time I just wanted to give you a basic understand of just how much we IT pros struggle with spam Emails and how much they really do annoy us too.
I plan to help fight them on this domain and a few others by adding to what I’ve already done. So far I am using spamassassin along with a host of other tools which help to filter over 70% of what my domains really receive but it doesn’t seem to be enough anymore, so I am going to try to add another layer by using a free service called MX Guard Dog. This is that they don’t ask for money, they trade in credits and for simply posting the following link, I get some credits. How many really depends on how often people visit my site (but I’m told not how often people click the link). So I am not saying click the link, I just want to inform you and by reading this blog, you are helping to support my efforts to filter spam.
Click on the link if you want, up to you.