i spoke too soon

Just received a report from someone who uses my mail server. The chart quantifies the amount of daily spam received since the end of November. You might have noticed or heard that spam (unsolicited emails) levels have drastically increased in recent months. This put my web/email server under very high loads as it tried to filter large volumes of mail. In struggling with this problem I found a new friend in a spam blocker called ASSP, the Anti-Spam SMTP Proxy. ASSP is a spam blocker for mail servers.

I am amazed. As you can see in the report, spam diminished from 30 to 0. I haven’t quantified my own spam receiving levels but I was receiving hundreds per day and now I only have a few. In addition to stopping all this spam, my server load has also dropped dramatically. Thank you ASSP!

ASSP has a handy web interface for configuring all its many filters. One filter that made a big difference is the “Delaying" also known as Greylisting. I’ve also heard this referred to as tar-pitting. The idea is approximately that the server delays the connection so spamming becomes much less effective but normal mail goes through.

Filed under: business, guidedvision.com, open source, software on January 9th, 2007