Be prepared for SPAM [RESOLVED]

[daniel]

I've been an HG client for more than 5 years and overall I am very happy with their service and product offering. However, be prepared to receive lots (and lots!) of spam through their mailservers. They simply do not have effective enough spam filtering.

Yes, HG do have spamassassin (SA) and spambox but SA doesn't seem to filter well enough and often spam will all of a sudden increase 10 fold for several weeks with no real explanation or help. I have experienced this many times over my several years with HG (and am experiencing at this very moment).

The main HG response I receive is that I have SA setup correctly and I should use spambox (however this is too inconvenient for most recipients due to the verification process). Then there is a the resultant "there's nothing else we can do" response...

Other than this my experience has been very positive, hopefully a newer SPAM filtering system will be implemented within the next 5 years!

[GatorJoshL]

Good Morning Daniel,
I apologize that you are having troubles with spam, I know how frustrating it is. It is something we deal with daily here also. There are a couple of different options you can try to prevent the delivery of spam. First of all you can login and make sure your spam assassin is enabled, if it is try making it a lower score than what it is set at. If it is already set low in the 3 or 4 range then that should be fine. You can also try to setup email filters by clicking in your cpanel on Mail -> Email Filtering. You can do a quick google search on "Spam Filter Words" and find a list of common spam words that you can filter out. Finally you can do what we do here at HostGator, and use BoxTrapper. BoxTrapper is a pretty neat program. It makes users verify that they are a real person when they send a message to you. You can also add users to your whitelist so that they do not have to verify. Once the user is verified then they are added to the whitelist and will not have to ever verify again. This reduces spam TREMENDOUSLY.

Try some of these measures and if you still are receiving a good number of spam, just let us know. We are glad to assist you in any way we can.

Daniel, please realize that SPAM is a world wide problem and not related to hostgator. There are preventative measure that we can take, but all in all there is no way to prevent all SPAM messages. If you can send us an email to support@hostgator.com one of our Admins can assist you with getting some of these programs setup and configured to help reduce the amount. Please include your primary domain name in the ticket to expedite this process.

Thank you Daniel,
Josh Loe
Systems Administrator Lv1

[daniel]

Hi Josh,

Thanks for your response.

I do understand spam is a worldwide systems problem, however I do feel many other hosts/ISPs have better solutions in place to tackle more effectively than HG. I do not say this lightly as I have investigated this subject in great length over the years and everytime HGs response is the same as you gave below e.g."Lower SAs rating" (which I have already) and "setup BoxTrapper" (as mentioned this is too inconvenient for recipients).

Awhile ago I setup a dedicated server elsewhere with other (free) spam filtering software that removed 95% of spam, however when I mentioned this to you, you said the program (I can't remember it at the moment) was too intensive on server resources.

All of a sudden during the last 2 weeks my spam has increased from +-5 per day to +-40 per day. This seems to happen every couple of months through HG... I manage over 100 accounts and several hundred email boxes through HG and the only solution would be a top level filter and not editing each account to filter common spam words - this isn't viable for me.

Any further help will be appreciated.

[GatorJoshL]

Daniel,

As of right now the only options that we have avaliable to prevent spam is the ones I have listed in this forum post.

However, if you purchased a dedicated with us, you can install whatever spam preventative measures you would like. But on our shared/reseller servers you have to realize that there is a lot of activity on the servers and adding more processes to the server will cause a lot more issues. I am open to any suggestions you might have Daniel.

Thank you

[daniel]

Hi Josh,

This was the spam filtering software that worked brilliantly:
http://www.mailscanner.info/

Is it possible to setup on Reseller hosting?

[GatorJoshL]

Daniel,

Unfortuantely it is not possible to set that up on a share/reseller Box. I will however pass this information on to Brent to look into.

However, I have good news for you. We have pushed out a new version of spam assassin and this should clear up a lot of your spam issues. If it persists let us know and we'll assists you personally in configuring one of our spam prevention programs installed.

Thanks Daniel I hope your weekend is going as good as mine.

Josh Loe

[daniel]

If you were able to install mailscanner on the share/reseller box then this would definately help everyone else not only my account.

Unfortunately, no sign of spam dissipating. Still receiving between 50 to 75 per day and rising...

I'd appreciate it if you could setup the "spam prevention program" as soon as possible.

[daniel]

Hi Josh,

Thank you for personally helping to resolve this issue. It is almost resolved and I appreciate all your efforts. It's what I've come to expect at HG - you guys go the extra mile for customer support - thank you.

You can change thread to positive if you wish.

Regards,
Daniel

[daniel]

Hi Josh,

It's been just over a year since my original spam post. The problem was resolved (thanks to the HG team), however spam is now again creeping up. Where myself and all my clients receive massive amounts of spam daily. We've implemented an aggressive SA setting of 5.0 (anything more and legit mails get marked as spam). However, this is still not resolving the problem.

Is there anything you can do to sort out this problem again (or once and for all)...

Looking forward to your response,
Daniel

[GatorJoshL]

Daniel,

I am sorry to see that SPAM has become an issue again with your accounts. If you will PM me your domains that are having trouble I can check the spam assassin settings and make sure everything is setup correctly.

Thanks,
Josh Loe

[twohawks]

I am suddenly getting hammered as well - maybe 10 to 20 fold sudden increase in spam. I have posted elsewhere in these forums in the past about better use of spf filtering and some aspects of spf that HG could implement here but has/will not for whatever reason.


Isn't spam a b_tch ?!

[dashaver]

I use Horde with Spam Assassin and it sends about 150 per day to the trash for me. If one get through I blacklist it.

[lsimpson]

My last Host (Powweb) used Grey Listing and I hardly received any SPAM. Can Brent look at some other SPAM solutions, Spamassassin is not filtering effectively enough.

[Target2019]

I am also having problems with increased spam on reseller account. What options do I have? Can I simply delete mail by specific TLD? What other techniques are people using?

[New2This]

I am also noticing a lot of spam recently, is there something we can do to eliminate or at lease reduce them....

[BobA]

I've been monitoring spam in my spam folder daily for about three years. Originally at 35 per day in February 2008 it began gradually decreasing to 10 per day by December 2008 and stayed at 1-3 per day from January 2009 to May 2009. Supposedly several spam operations were shut down and some people were even prosecuted during that time.

However, with a huge spike in spam starting in June 2009 it seems there are now more spammers operating than before. During July 2009 the amount of spam doubled from the previous month and my spam count is back to 35 per day (average). Compared to some people who report >100 spam e-mails per day I guess I'm lucky. During the past week it has increased another 10% to 40 per day.

Spam Assassin catches >95% of the spam.