Reducing spam

Spam now accounts for approximately 95% of all email on the Internet and has become a huge problem. Although we filter out at least 80% of this, many junk emails still find their way into the mailbox.

Bounced emails from your own domain

It's now becoming quite common that spammers are forging other people's domain names into the return address headers for the spam that's sent out. Unfortunately nothing can be done to stop the spammer from doing this if they're using their own server or one abroad. However, if you're still using the default (catchall) mail account, it's possible to stop many of the bounced messages from being received. If you have a cPanel® hosting account with ourselves, what you need to do is as follows...

Log into the control panel for your account.
Go to the Mail section.
Click "Add/Remove/Manage Accounts" and create a personal account (e.g. fred@domain.tld).
Go back to the mail section and click "Forwarders". In this section, add any other addresses such as info@, sales@ etc to be forwarded to the personal account you've just set up.
Go back to the mail section and click "Default Address". Change the default address to :fail: so that future emails sent to incorrect addresses won't be accepted.
In your mail program - collect email for the last time using the default account and then in the email settings, change your username to the email account you've created (e.g. fred@domain.tld).

Email dictionary attack

This is where the spammer sends an email to multiple addresses at a single domain in the hope that at least one email will finally get through. If you use a catchall email account which allows ALL email addresses (as usually set up by default), you will not only receive the spam but there's also no method of detecting the attack. If you don't use the catchall account, our servers can detect the attack from the number of failed attempts and ban the sending mail server from sending more email. In turn, this stops the spam email. To stop using a catchall email account, follow the instructions above for reducing bounced emails.

Filtering

We first reduce the number of spam emails directly sent to our clients by rejecting all emails from blacklisted mail servers. These are servers which have been reported by several different organisations as sending out spam. We also reject any emails which don't conform to RFC standards. As such a high percentage of all email is now spam, this helps reduce the amount of junk cluttering up our client's mailboxes.

On all our cPanel® hosting accounts, there's also the option to filter emails based on keywords. For more information on this, please click here.

Avoid using autoresponders

If you receive any spam, then we recommend that you don't use autoresponders. It's possible that your auto-response will inform the spammer that your email account is active and you'll then be sent even more spam as a result. Many spam emails are sent with a forged reply address of a third party which results in the autoresponse going to a third party without knowledge from your account and this can result in your autoresponse being reported as spam.