Join us to Fight SPAM!

Our mail servers use many anti-spam techniques and we hardly see any spam. We sort of miss them.

Primary technique is anti-spam DNSBL feature (sometimes called "Blacklist DNS Servers" or "RBL servers") which makes queries to numerous RBL servers before accepting emails.

RBL servers which we currently use are :

• cbl.abuseat.org
• dnsbl.sorbs.net
• bl.spamcop.net
• dul.dnsbl.sorbs.net
• sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org
• list.dsbl.org
• dnsbl-1.uceprotect.net

So if you are blacked listed in any of the above servers, we can't get your email.

Here is a brief description of other techniques that we use:

• If you don't identify yourself properly, we'll ignore you.
• If you don't issue correct MTA commands, we'll drop you.
• If your IP doesn't resolve, we refuse you.
• If you don't have reverse DNS associated, you can't get in touch with us.
• If you want to relay, we will reject you.
• If you are listed or get listed in our proprietary block list access database, you are blocked.
• If you don't have DNS mail record (MX) associated, you can't email us. (not implemented yet, researching the impact of false positives!)
• If you are in our RBL database that has been synchronized, you are blacklisted. (not needed at this time until proven wrong!)

If an email is sent through all above filters to our servers and email is identified as a spam, then it is categorized as a FRESH SPAM!

Since our mail servers have been around the internet for close to a decade, we  are among the first servers to get the fresh spam.

The new fresh spam that comes through must pass through all filter rules that we mentioned above. So the concept of fresh spam is a very important criteria in the war against spam.

Fresh spam is a representation of a new (just recently) compromised machine that is used by spammers who are really struggling to get emails out and they are trying to do their best to find machines to bounce off of and it is getting harder for them to do so.

So the time of the fresh spam arrival is very close to the time that they found a new victim's machine and we, in our part, will do our duty to report it to RBL and network administrators. It is important for the reports to be filed as soon as the fresh spam arrives.

The reports filed identifies the location and address of the source of the fresh spam.

To summarize, fresh spam concept is very important to understand in the war against spammers. It is an on-going battle. But spammers are the one who are doing most of the work to find victims to bounce their email off of and we help locate these victims and get these machines secured.

In conclusion, we do accept fresh yummy spam, but we do report it to RBL databases. It should be very clear why we don't use any web technology to hide emails from our site, like many other sites that do that!!!

Here is a stat to consider. If we remove all of our anti-spam walls/filters and turn our servers loose, we will get around 300 emails a day. With our anti-spam filtering technology, we only get one fresh spam every few days if even that.

We hope that we were able to explain concept of fresh yummy spam to the anti-spam community. Each anti-spam filter that we have placed, is a reciprocal representation of a unique set of spamming technology that spammers use. So basically, spammers are at the end of the game with all the techniques used within email communication protocols, until we find out other ways that they might be pursuing.

Therefore, We enjoy contributing to anti-spam community!

For the time being, reporting fresh spam (populating RBL databases) is a very good thing to do for helping others from being spammed.

Keep in mind, reports filed also help network administrators to locate and secure computers that have turned into a zombie-bot by worms and viruses placed by spammers or machines that has been mis-configured and hijacked by spammers. Our anti-spam efforts have located many computers/networks that have been infected by viruses and worms or machines that are incorrectly configured by IT newbie.

Remember, Spam is big business and many ISP rely on spammers from a operational perspective in order to survive and they will allow spam to be sent out of their network and countries!

There is no doubt that we are aggressive in this fight, but the truth of the matter is that the sender of email has shown some sort of inappropriate introduction within the protocols involved in email communication and that's why we might miss innocent emails that happen to fall into the categories described and they need to correct themselves before we can allow emails thru. So far, we have had a very low false positives.

At this point, with all the anti-spam filters placed on our mail servers, everything is truly out of our control and it is all automated. Therefore it all depends on the integrity of the protocol the sender uses.

We run all above filters on sendmail and postfix mail servers with Procmail and Spam Assassin.

Here is the email you can use to either spam or just email us: admin@inftech.com

Our final recommendation to everyone is to study anti-spam technology to join the fight against spam and keep reporting spammers to RBL.

Here are some links for information:

Latest anti-spam news :

http://www.virusbtn.com/news/spam_news/index

http://news.techrepublic.com.com/topic.aspx?topic=37

http://www.clearmymail.com/latest_spam_news.aspx

http://cbl.abuseat.org/

http://spam.abuse.net/

For stopping telemarketers:

https://www.donotcall.gov/default.aspx

http://whocalled.us/

http://www.obviously.com/junkmail/

http://stopspam.inpacifica.com/stop-telemarketers.html

Please Spam me!