Nekkid Ninjas

Follow up:

"The ASSP server project is an Open Source platform-independent transparent SMTP proxy server that leverages numerous methodologies and technologies to both rigidly and adaptively identify spam"

What that means, as far as this post is concerned, is that to become most effective ASSP takes time to settle in as it learns what is spam and what is not spam. And I'm very happy to say that it has done very well!!

Time for several steps backward, from a hosting philosophy point of view.

I've previously used various incarnations of SpamAssassin and Real-time Black Hole List (RBL) sources and, to be honest, I didn't like it at all. Not because it didn't (doesn't) work rather because of the impact on my hosting business and customer's mail. Let me clarify by making a few summary points;

• A Spam-Assassin and RBL combination is man-power intensive, both to set up and maintain
• RBL's are not perfect and it is possible that legitimate mail is blocked because of an erroneous RBL listing of your server.
• Such e-mail just "disappears"; the intended recipient is not told that an e-mail sent to them has been blocked and the sender is not informed that their e-mail has been blocked

ASSP offers

• From an admin point of view, ASSP is much easier to maintain and keep up-to-date.
• From a user's point of view there are several huge benefits:
• All incoming mail that might be spam is given the chance to prove that it is from a genuine mail source. At this point if a mail fails this check it is dropped altogether. The only way that this check can falsely flag a mail as spam is if the sender's mail server is incorrectly configured. What this means is that its almost impossible for genuine mail to be dropped at this point.
• It is possible tho' that spam can be sent from a genuine mail server. In this case the incoming mail reaches the next stage.
• ASSP uses it's "methodologies" to identify if a mail is spam or genuine
• Mail that it flags as spam is filtered to a specific mailbox ("spambox") for user review - perhaps to check for false-positives
• Mail that is recognised as genuine mail is forwarded to the user's mailbox
• False-negatives, mail that is spam, can be processed by the user by forwarding the offending mail to ASSP and then ASSP changes the way it works
• Mail that is coralled in "spambox" mail account is trimmed after 8 days
• ASSP will auto white-list any mail address to which the user sends e-mail

So, from this you can probably guess that I am now a huge fan of ASSP!! To give you an idea of how well it works, I have a few stats for you to view.

This first image is a grab of SPAMBOX maintenance from the first few days of running ASSP on the server:

That image shows the numbers of mails that have been removed from the spambox after the holding period of 8 days. Scary, huh?

This second image is from the spambox report of yesterday. The account(s) that shown above with the huge numbers of accumulated spam is listed at 2nd and 3rd poistion in this next list:

I think that, in anyone's books that is impressive, so much so that ASSP is now "complaining" that it's not receiving enough spam

Bring it on!