Wrightsites.com Hosting Blog

People either love or hate spam.  Wait, I’m supposed to be talking about junk email, not the canned meat!  Unsolicited bulk email, usually called spam, is a pain and only the people sending it appreciate it.  Right? 

Not entirely true!  Spammers don’t mind spam because they are getting paid big money to make sure you and I see that message.  And the “advertisers” who are paying the spammers to send the messages out wouldn’t be paying that much money unless it was working.  That’s right – somewhere on this planet, people actually buy stuff they see in their spam!  Apparently, they buy enough to make the cost of a spam run worthwhile.  So the first tip to reducing spam is to ignore it!  If you know someone buying from spam, explain to them that they are making spam worthwhile and paying for its survival.

Beyond cutting off the effectiveness of spam, there isn’t much we can do to stop it.  And as a web hosting provider, we have to provide our clients with email service, so now what?  Now, we have to find a way to deal with it.  That’s exactly what I decided to do almost three years ago.  At the time, I was getting close to a thousand emails a day.  Since my email goes to my desktop computer and my smartphone, one or the other was downloading new mail constantly and it seemed like I never got anything done.  I tracked my time one week to see how much time I spent dealing with all of the spam I was getting – 532 minutes in seven days.  That is nearly nine hours of my time spent on junk mail.  Put that into dollars – how much do earn per hour?  I bill myself out at $75 per hour for some services and that would be roughly $675 per week spend on spam.  Seeing that number was a real wake up call.  I needed a better solution.

During this time, we were using one of the many available systems for blocking/filtering spam.  We were using a system called SpamAssassin.  We even used an addon for SA called Rules du Jour.  This addon was an automated system that would update the rules SpamAssassin used to block spam.  Even with this, for SA to really be effective, you need to spend hours on tweaking the rules.  I know of some large hosting companies that have full-time employees dedicated to nothing but updating these rules.  By doing this, they can typically achieve an 80% block rate.  Not bad, that would cut my spam down to around 200 per day, but I didn’t have the time to spare to do this, nor the $30,000+ per year to pay someone else.  Plus, the more you lock down SpamAssassin, the higher the risk that you will mess up legitimate emails.  You know that email joke about Viagra that Uncle Bob sent you?  No?  Maybe your email goes through SpamAssassin and it blocked it because it mentioned Viagra.  This was another major challenge that I faced.  I did not want to do anything that was going to cause this situation.  But all hope was not lost…

There are many products available as “network appliances” an example of which would be a router or network switch like you might have in your home.  The anti-spam appliances are larger though – more like the size of a five-disc CD changer.  The Barracuda is probably the best known of anti-spam appliances.  Many companies use these in-house to block junk mail from their internal networks.  Some of the others are: IronMail, Spam Marshall, SpamGate, and MailFoundry.  I looked at these and some other options, but selected MailFoundry.  MailFoundry was far from the cheapest.  It impressed me with its claimed kill rate of 98% of incoming spam.  Even more impressive though, was their claim that they could do this without blocking legitimate email.  Always before, the more you clamped down on spam, the more legitimate email would get caught in the net too.  MailFoundry claimed to have a false-positive rate of one in one million emails.  So I tested it out for a couple of months on a handful of accounts.  As promised, it blocked roughly 98% of spam, 100% of viruses, and it did so without a single false positive!

That’s how our Mr. GoodMail system came to be.  Mr. GoodMail is really a MailFoundry that I’ve branded in such a way to promote for myself and our resellers.  Ok, Ok Mark, but how does that help me, the website owner?  Well, if you host with Wrightsites.com, you get the Mr. GoodMail system free.  It isn’t automatic though, you’ll have let us know you’d like it added.  But the system definitely works.  We process upwards of one million messages per month.  Between 93% and 95% of these messages are blocked by Mr. GoodMail – sent to our users only in a quarantine digest that allows for retrieval of any mail that is accidentally blocked.  Generally, 3%-5% of mail is legitimate.  So that means we are blocking roughly 98% of the spam that you would get otherwise.  If you happen to be reading this and host your website somewhere besides Wrightsites.com, feel free to contact us about buying our Mr. GoodMail service as a standalone service. 

And for those of you who are hosted with us at Wrightsites.com, if you do get mail that is spam, it probably slipped through Mr. GoodMail.  Please forward spam on to spam@mrgoodmail.biz so that we can forward that on to MailFoundry and they can adjust the system to block that message in the future.

So, to help reduce the amount of junk email cluttering your box, make sure you do not buy anything from spam, sign up for hosting from Wrightsites.com or anti-spam service through Mr. GoodMail, and make sure to send any spam that makes it through our filters to spam@mrgoodmail.biz.

Thanks for joining me this week.  I hope you’ll be back again next Thursday when I discuss hosting control panels.