No Emails from Sussex, Essex & Middlesex

[Chris]

Has anyone else based in East Sussex, West Sussex, Wessex, Essex or Middlesex had issues sending / receiving emails recently??

We have noticed we have been losing mails over the past few months but only recently have come to the conclusion that perhaps EUKhost servers are being rather over zealous in filtering out messages if the county name ending 'sex' is included within the email subject.

Unfortunately this can have an extremely serious consequence as you can imagine that numerous important mails to/from local government, agencies, organisations, clubs and societies would be automatically excluded !

Perhaps someone from EUKhost could investigate and if it's true work out a more sophisticated filter?

regards
Chris.

[Rock]

Hello Chris,

The word "sex" isn't filtered by the spam filters setup on the servers, there are many emails which have this word either embedded in them [like the subject has] or even normal emails contain such words. The mail filters on the email servers are configured to term only those emails as 'spam' which are indeed 100% spam, they work on policies designed to detect most on the spam emails, ie: they match the pattern.. Important part is that such emails aren't deleted but only the subject is rewritten with a preceding "***SPAM***" string.

As you've posted this thread in a Linux forum, I guess you can configure the spam assassin rules for your domain/emails. There is a "whitelisting" feature provided within SpamAssassin which lets you to white list certain email addresses containing specific words.

Or either way to configure the rules manually is to edit the /home/username/.spamassassin/user_prefs file & make the changes accordingly:

vi /home/username/.spamassassin/user_prefs

required_hits 1
rewrite_subject 1
rewrite_header Subject **SPAM**

Note, If you don't have SSH access to the server, this file can be changed through cPanel too

You can send test emails to yourself with the above word in the subject line or in the mail content & check if you receive that email, I assure you will. If you don't receive the mails, please feel free to submit a ticket to our support dept & they'd get this issue checked for you.

[Chris]

Jack,

Thanks for the reply - but it leaves me more puzzled.

Of course I have already tried some test emails and can confirm that an email with only 'sussex' in the subject did not arrive whereas one with 'kent' there came through in seconds.

I have repeated the test using non eukhost accounts to prove that it is not my ISP that is filtering.

OK, I will raise a ticket - I presume you can trace the delivery path really easily if it starts and ends with an eukhost account!

regards
Chris.

[Chris]

Well a ticket to help desk sorted this out fairly quickly. So thanks and full marks for that.

And of course it turns out that there IS a filter file on the servers which blocks mail with supposedly dodgy content and it WAS blocking anything with 'sex' in it, even within another word. But thats sorted now.

I did raise the question on the help desk as to who is able to vet this file - because I feel a bit helpless not knowing what else might be in that filter which may even at this moment be blocking something innocent for my mail or those of all my customer accounts, due to similar oversight of the programmer ...

... but no reply yet.

regards
Chris.