Spam Filter

August 5, 2004

I’m starting a new category (Recommended) for services, applications, utilities, etc. that I would recommend without hesitation.

The first entry is for SpamStopsHere hosted anti-spam service. I’ve been using their service since December 2003 and I love it. I can’t recommend these guys high enough.

With the initial, default settings, SpamStopsHere will “out of the box” block 99% of all spam for most customers. We believe it is actually very close now to 99.5%. (I.e. we block 199 out of 200 spams.) If the Realtime Blacklists (RBLs) and Country Filtering are disabled, our service will still block 98% of spam; in this mode the false-positive rate will be less than 1 in 100,000 (i.e. 99.999% of legitimate email will pass).

I’ve had the same personal email address since mid 1998. Early on I was not that careful about using it to sign up for sites or post online. By 2003, I was getting 40-50 spam messages a day - not as many as some people, but more than I wanted to deal with. I needed a solution and looked at all of the available options. Most of the options involved Outlook plug-ins or extensions. I didn’t want to be burdened with constantly updating my local filters and that did nothing for me when I went out of town and checked email remotely. There were several services that would login to your email box and filter out the spam. These didn’t appeal to me either - seemed a little unreliable and not as clean as I wanted. I knew what I wanted: A service to pass my email through before it got to my mailbox or Outlook. I knew that those services existed at the ISP level (Brightmail and postini) but these are expensive services not meant for small domains. After a lot of digging, I finally ran across SpamStopsHere as a viable option for filtering family/small business domains.

SpamStopsHere is a server-based mail filtering application. No more do you have to manage and tweak and update some Outlook plug-in to keep spam out of your inbox. These guys take care of all that for you and are continuously updating their filters to catch the latest tricks. The other benefit is that it manages the spam filtering for the entire domain. I am providing filtering for the 9 members of my family (under their family plan) that use an email address under my personal domain. While $99 may be hard to justify for just one email address, the fact that I can cover 10 people for that is palatable.

It isn’t for everyone though. Two requirements: you need to own the domain that you use for email and you need to ability/capability to be able to modify the MX records on your domain. The MX record is responsible for routing your email traffic to the appropriate mail server. So for SpamStopsHere, you change your MX records to route incoming email through their servers which then filter the emails based on their rules and any clean emails are then forwarded on to your email server.

One other great feature: they also provide an anti-virus upgrade. So, for an extra $25/year, I can have them scan my email for viruses as it passes through their service. I added this earlier this year when there were so many email viruses going around. Sure, I had Norton locally to catcht them, but it was still a pain to get a popup from Norton each time an infected message came through.

I was a little reluctant to sign up for the service initially because I couldn’t find any other information on them since their product/service was so new at the time. A little research turned up another product, VEDIT, that the same company has been working on for 20+ years. That convinced me that I was dealing with someone with experience and long-term plans.

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Posted by Matt Smith | Filed Under Recommended, Spam | 1 Comment 

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