Spam Filtering: June 2007 Archives

If you want to do something dodgy online there are ways to do it without getting caught. Of course some people obviously think that they won't get caught and try some really dumb things. Damien got crap service from an Irish company recently and blogged about it. There are several ways that the company in question could react to this kind of situation, but obviously someone in there decided to take matters into their own hands. They seem to have signed Damien up for a load of gay dating sites - from their office IP which is clearly assigned to the company! Talk about dumb! Tip: If you have a fixed IP properly assigned to you or your employer acting the maggot online is a bad idea! The other little "gem" is the email I got this morning from yet another one of those companies that works really hard to get business. You know the type - they're in the same category as the vendors of herbal viagra and all those other gems. The email is a classic:

To whom it may concern, Have your WebSite Designed or Renovated.

Brilliant! So you don't know who you are addressing and you don't know how to punctuate either! But it gets better.. skip past all the badly worded marketing crap to the footer:

This email was sent according to the guidelines of the Data Protection Commissioner All recipients of this mail were compiled from online directories therefore given permission to be contacted by email.

That's brilliant! So not only are you spamming me, now you're trying to say that your spam is "ok", since our website is listed in online directories. Maybe aadwebdesign.com can hook up with whoever submitted Damien's email to the gay dating sites. I'm sure they'd have a lot in common!

SPF has been around for a couple of years now and is included with all installs of Spam Assassin by default. So why is it that some hosting companies can't understand how it works or how email filtering works? It's not rocket science. SPF, which I've mentioned here several times in the past, allows a domain owner to specify which mail hosts can send mail from the domain. It's of particular relevance if you are likely to be spoofed, so it's hardly surprising that financial institutions are using SPF records. What is surprising is that some Irish hosting companies obviously do not know how to configure their mail so that SPF actually works. One client contacted our technical support team this morning as their mails weren't reaching their destination. Why? It seems that for some reason the hosting company in question's mail servers were changing the headers of the mails, so the source IP was being set to be the email filter and not the actual source itself. End result being that the mails couldn't get through Brilliant!