Mail Foundry please

**rvbeck** · #1 (**permalink**) 13-05-2008, 10:00

Despite reading all the good advice found on these forums, I have found it difficult to get the SPAM filters working accurately. They need constant training, and they still pick up a number of false positives. From the forums, it seems that I am not the only one ; a significant amount of effort/resources of EUKHOST support and clients seems to be spent on sorting out SPAM issues.

This could be avoided by using a more rugged spam filter system. Mail Foundry works superbly well, and many hosting sites seem to be switching to it. With our previous hosts ( good for email but unfortunately poor for the web web site hosting performance) we were quite happy to pay a few GPBs per month extra to add Mail Foundry for our 10+15 mail addresses.

So far with EUKHOST I can report excellent performance and support for the web applications, but I feel a little more attention and investment on the email side is needed.

Currently I am contemplating retaining our previous hosting account, just to process the emails, but as this would require messing around with the DNS servers , this is really a last resort, not to mention the additional cost of maintaining 2 hosting packages.

Kind regards

Richard Beck
fowlertools.co.uk

**jc8654** · #2 (**permalink**) 13-05-2008, 11:08

SPAM assasin comes as standard on all of the Linux hosting packages. If it's set to 10 and reject anything above it is normally pretty effective. I haven't had any SPAM since I set it as such. I do however have a VPS Hosting which allows me to do this stuff.

**rvbeck** · #3 (**permalink**) 13-05-2008, 13:17

Currently we are using the default value of 7, but I am very concerned with the number of false positives. E.g we get a lot of false positives from our ebay account, even after 'training'. Hence I am reluctant to simply reject at server level and instead have set up filters on the mail clients. This is a real pain. Systems like Mail Foundry (and others!) at least package up the SPAM and send them in a mail once per day + we never once got a false positive in 2+ years.

This is consuming a lot of time and effort when I feel there are more hassel-free solutions around that should be considered.

regs
Richard

Rock · #4 (**permalink**) 14-05-2008, 03:30

Richard, I've replied to your ticket with the solution.
I'd also like to suggest you to whitelist "*@ebay.com" so that none of the genuine emails are blacklisted or termed as SPAM. This can be done from within Plesk..

**rvbeck** · #5 (**permalink**) 14-05-2008, 13:56

Quote:

Originally Posted by Rock

Richard, I've replied to your ticket with the solution.
I'd also like to suggest you to whitelist "*@ebay.com" so that none of the genuine emails are blacklisted or termed as SPAM. This can be done from within Plesk..

Hi,
My problem was that the server wide spam control (not my plesk spam filter), i.e the one that provides the [SPAM] tag, was creating false positives - I do not have a dedicated server or VPS Hosting and so I have no control over this spam function, and it is this spam filter that was previously rejecting genuine mails from ebay( and some others)

Jack from support has kindly proposed to loosen the server wide spam settings, but this has now significantly increased the number of untagged spam mails. It seems the only way to tag most spam and avoid false positives , is to ask support to add specific networks to the server wide system - or I guess buy a VPS Hosting

This also suggests that SPAM ASSASIN is perhaps not as good as some other systems.

In respect of "My spam filter" (that I can set from plesk) , I am not sure I am using the same plesk, because in my plesk environment, under spam filter -> training we have a tag for white list, black list and network, but in fact they always bring up the same page i.e a list of emails to set as forget it , is spam, is not spam. In fact the plesk that I see for spam filtering control , is not the one that is described in the plesk help. Perhaps I am in the wrong place ? There is nowhere to enter a white list network address (not that I can find).

Anyway, my real gripe is the compexity and effort to get SPAM ASSASIN running properly. I have no doubt that it can be set up to be comparable to other systems, but it does consume a lot of effort, compared to some of my previous hosting anti spam systems.

regs

Richard

**Site** · #6 (**permalink**) 14-05-2008, 16:32

I too had SPAM ASSASIN running a while back and had to remove it due to it false triggering [SPAM] in genuine emails.

No alternative found yet, other then get them to confirm they are human.

**jc8654** · #7 (**permalink**) 15-05-2008, 23:49

I thought you could configure Spam Assasin to do different things with mail e.g. send it to a spam box however I might be thinking about things on a Linux VPS Hosting which wouldn't be much help here...

**Site** · #8 (**permalink**) 16-05-2008, 09:05

Hmmm, Maybe you can... I'll take a look into it.

Thanks

**jc8654** · #9 (**permalink**) 16-05-2008, 10:13

Other option would be to get Spam Assasin to mark spam and then use something like Outlook to filter those to junk so you can check them.... It's not ideal but would be better than nothing.

**jessjane** · #10 (**permalink**) 15-11-2008, 06:59

Some times i mail to my friend from gmail and its direct goes to junk mail not in inbox. This frustum mail system of gmail also have. So i don't think so that any anti spam system is free from this problem.

**DPS Computing** · #11 (**permalink**) 15-11-2008, 18:45

Quote:

Originally Posted by jessjane

Some times i mail to my friend from gmail and its direct goes to junk mail not in inbox. This frustum mail system of gmail also have. So i don't think so that any anti spam system is free from this problem.

Has the domain your sending the mail from got spf records?

**aa1767a** · #12 (**permalink**) 15-12-2008, 18:22

If you do not see false positives for Mail Foundry then you must not be looking or process very little email for very few domains.

Mail Foundry blocks a LOT of legitimate customer business mail in our environment of thousands of domains and millions of messages per day.

It seems that they have someone defining their spam rules who thinks it is a good idea
to block messages regardless of content because the have a footer for AVG scan engine or Hotmail or MSN, all perfectly legitimate footers.

I have been asking, pleading and cajoling them for over a year to find a way to stop blocking our customers legitimate email and they have just ignored me. If you don't care if your customer's legitimate emails are blocked, then by all means go for Mail Foundry.

They won't even make an enhancement to the interface to allow us to whitelist keywords in subject and body as most spam appliances do. If they would at least provide that functionality, we could 'tailor' the blocking to exclude key words that our customers use all the time as they are all realtors, but they have ignored my requests for over a year to fix this egregious problem.

**DPS Computing** · #13 (**permalink**) 15-12-2008, 18:40

Hmmm, sounds like you've had a tough time of it. Thats why I use SpamAssassin - its got all the features that you normally require, easy to setup and very effective

.

**aa1767a** · #14 (**permalink**) 15-12-2008, 19:00

Quote:

Originally Posted by DPS Computing

Hmmm, sounds like you've had a tough time of it. Thats why I use SpamAssassin - its got all the features that you normally require, easy to setup and very effective

.

Not really. We started with Spam Assasin and it is too time consuming to train, innacurate and load intensive
for the magnitude of our environment. We would need to constantly monitor and maintain several servers and didn't want to make a career of it.

**DPS Computing** · #15 (**permalink**) 15-12-2008, 19:03

I have SpamAssassin set up monitoring around 40 e-mail addresses which recieve thousands of e-mails a day between them. After initial (correct) setup I haven't had to touch it. It lets a few (and I mean a few) spam e-mails through but has never blocked a genuine e-mail and everything marked as spam has always been 100% spam. So I am a bit perplexed by your comments.... I can't say that I have had to train it, or thats its inaccurate or "load insensitive".

Just to clarify what do you mean exactly by "load insenstive".

**aa1767a** · #16 (**permalink**) 15-12-2008, 19:07

Quote:

Originally Posted by DPS Computing

I have SpamAssassin set up monitoring around 40 e-mail addresses which recieve thousands of e-mails a day between them. After initial (correct) setup I haven't had to touch it. It lets a few (and I mean a few) spam e-mails through but has never blocked a genuine e-mail and everything marked as spam has always been 100% spam. So I am a bit perplexed by your comments.... I can't say that I have had to train it, or thats its inaccurate or "load insensitive".

Just to clarify what do you mean exactly by "load insenstive".

We have over 10,000 accounts and 12,000 domains receiving over 6,000,000 emails a day

I said load INTENSIVE.. not insensitive

meaning the servers processing that much email with spam assasin running would often reach loads of over 50-100 with 6 servers running in parallel

**DPS Computing** · #17 (**permalink**) 16-12-2008, 11:53

Quote:

Originally Posted by aa1767a

We have over 10,000 accounts and 12,000 domains receiving over 6,000,000 emails a day

I said load INTENSIVE.. not insensitive

meaning the servers processing that much email with spam assasin running would often reach loads of over 50-100 with 6 servers running in parallel

Ah right. Well I can't comment on such usage as I have never experienced that. I can see that, if true, that would cause you problems using it

.