Sent 6/4/2003

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Greetings,

After spending a ridiculous amount of time the past week or so on first the manual filters and then tweaking the automatic filters on the upgraded version of the mail server I have turned over the processing to the little robots inside the mail server. Imagine the amount of SPAM that you would get on your own and then multiple that by the 300+ accounts on the mail server. I was having to look through all that crap multiple times per day.

I am sure that there will be “False Positives”, meaning valid email that get’s flagged as SPAM, just as there will be SPAM that gets through – no system is fool-proof (the spammers will just be bigger fools). Should you get contacted by someone that this happens to please just send me their email address so that I can add their domain to the “white-list” and thereby allow mail from them to come through the firewall that is on the mail server. Or if there is an email list that you are subscribed to and suddenly you find that you are no longer getting mail from that address anymore forward one of the emails from that person or list to the address, admin@microworks.net and I will see about updating the “white-list” with that domain too.

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Sent on 6/4/2003

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Greetings,

The mail server was updated last night and here are the stats from midnight to 7:45am

Email rejected as from an invalid address 43
Email rejected for content 257
Email allowed through 176

There will continue to be false positives. Generally these will come from ListServs that you may have joined. If one comes through it will be manually forwarded onto you and will require you to email back to indicate if this is a real piece of mail. If it the sending address will be added to an allowed list.

Sent on 6/2/2003

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Greetings,

You should have noticed a decrease in the amount of SPAM that is hitting your mailbox. During this test phase I have been monitoring the account that spam get’s redirected to a couple times a day and if I have found legitimate mail that got caught by mistake it has been forwarded on.

Sometime in the next day or so we will be making additional upgrades to the Mail servers that should help catch a bunch more SPAM.

Currently the type filters that are in place work off of keywords and phases, which is why some legitimate mail get’s caught and other mail get’s through. Mail that is formatted with web content can currently get through because of some “tricks” the spammers use in which they put “invisible” web programming language in the middle of words. The filter sees the entire “misspelled” word while you see only the actual word(s) that the spammer wants you to see.

The new update should catch those too. A good friend of mine upgraded his mail servers to this new version and he said that it has stopped 99% of the spam that was getting through!

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Sent on 5/13/2003
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Greetings,

This past evening we put in place some new filters on the Summit Internet Mail server that we hope will cut down significantly on the amount of junk and dangerous email that makes it through to your in-box.

While no method of filtering can or will be fool-proof just placing the filters on the system so far this evening we see that 34 pieces of possible Spam email were rejected and 1 piece of virus-like “suspicious” email were rejected for delivery within just the past hour and a half.

HOW IT WORKS:
When a piece of email arrives at the mail server it is passed through a set of four filters. These filters look at various parts of the email message looking for some specific tell-tale signs. If the message meets any of the criteria it is rejected and placed in a special email account that we have the ability to examine and will be purging on a weekly basis.

The person that sent you the email that was flagged as either suspicious for being virus-like or spam-like will get an immediate reply indicating one of two reasons for their mail being rejected. Either the message met the criteria for possibly being constructed like Spam or a different message telling them that they tried to send a file that met the criteria to be considered potentially dangerous for containing a virus and what they can do to resend the file to get
through the filters firewall.

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