When SPAM makes an e-mail account almost unusable

Factual Questions
1

I have an e-mail address I’ve had for business for over 25 years. It isn’t something I can simply change, because it is on publications, etc.

I have taken steps over the years to better manage the SPAM. First I started using Spamassassin and would whitelist important e-mail addresses and domains. I then added Boxtrapper which is available through CPANEL. To give you an idea of the volume of SPAM I get on a daily basis, within a 24 hour period over 800 messages of SPAM come through.

Boxtrapper seemed to be working for well for a long-time. How Boxtrapper works for those who don’t know, is that it allows you to white list, black list and ignore e-mail addesses. If someone sends you e-mail that is known to Boxtrapper, it sends back an automatic relying asking the user to click on a link this one time to get whitelisted.

Today I manually went into Boxtrapper to whitelist a company’s domain, and found out there are over 20,000 e-mail addresses whitelisted. I have perhaps manually entered over the years about 50 of them, the rest were added by the user clinking on the link from the automatic reply. So the Spammers have gotten smarter and many know this is Boxtrapper and do a reply to whitelist themselves and then their flood of SPAM continues coming through.

I have tweaked settings in Spamassassin, but the problem is something important will come through and I don’t get it. They weren’t whitelisted yet, and as you can see this is a pain.

This has made my “brand” for e-mail unusable for daily business like this. I have ended up using a secondary e-mail address which is not published when I do business and reply to e-mail.

I have wondering it there are other options I’ve overlooked to improve this situation about the SPAM?

One idea I thought about today, was instead of having people get a message back about how to be whitelisted is to direct them to a Contact Us form on the web site. Where the e-mail address for that would be my secondary e-mail, but it wouldn’t be revealed until I replied to them. I have a Contact Us form there now, and very rarely about once a month I get some spammer filling out the form, but that’s manageable.

I’d be interested in useful suggestions from people who have had to deal with a similar problem.

2

Gmail does a great job at filtering spam. You should be able to use your current email account through Gmail.

3

One technique is to setup a second email address, then publish that email address in a place and manner that prospective customers won’t use to try and find you. Finally configure your main email address to dump any messages that also arrive at that second address.

Also, you might look at switching or updating your anti-spam software since it sounds like it’s no longer doing it’s job. You’re best bet is some sort of subscription service as spam is game of cat and mouse.

4

If you’re an Outlook person (or would like to be), Office365 does a really good job of filtering spam.

With O365 (and other providers like gmail) you can enable SPF, DKIM and DMARC (all different pieces of the same puzzle). These tools allow you to authenticate the sender with the domain (SPF), recipients can authenticate your email using DKIM, and DMARC helps determine the disposition of email that fails SPF and DKIM tests.

I’d really look heavily into using an outsourced mail filter or mail service. I use both gmail and O365, and they both do an amazing job of rejecting spam. If I were to pick one over another, I think O365 really does a better job than Google.

5

I agree that using an existing big-name server is your best bet. Filtering spam is a job for a heavy hitter, not something you should be having to spend your time doing as a business owner.

Get your domain transferred to Google’s gmail service or like suretytek says, Office365. You can keep your domain name and usernames, I promise. They will have steps to help you make the transfer.

You can still use POP or IMAP or webmail. You’ll just have much better spam control.

6

Another recommendation to move your domain & email address to Gmail. It costs a few bucks a month. I used Network Solutions before, and SPAM was getting more and more annoying. Google’s SPAM filtering is almost flawless, they get everything.

7

Eudora, elderly though it is, still has one of the most versatile and powerful spam filtering architectures. It’s a big part of why I’m still using it.

8

Is there a reason why people in the thread keep writing spam in capitals? It’s not an acronym or initialism.

9

Well, the original Hormel meat-in-a-can product is styled in all-caps. And the name, via Monty Python, transferred to the email phenomenon. But in practice, the electronic version should be rendered in normal case conventions as appropriate for a verb or a common noun, while the all-caps or capitalized version (arguably) should be restricted to the food brand name.