Spam, also known as junk email or unsolicited commercial email (UCE), has been growing at ever increasing rates. To protect your email accounts against unwanted spam, SmartyHost has integrated the following spam filters on the email servers:
- Spamhaus block list: Our mail server will reject connections from know spam senders using a real-time block list supplied by Spamhaus.org. This is a conservative block list that only lists known spam senders.
- Greylisting: Our servers will temporarily reject any email from a sender that can not be recognized. The legitimate sender will try to deliver the email again, whereas the spam sender will probably not retry the delivery. For more information, please visit greylisting.org.
- SpamAssassin: All emails that are forwarded on or delivered to a local email account will also be scanned by SpamAssassin. It assigns a score to each email, where the higher the score, the greater the likelihood that it is a spam email. If it is over a certain score, the email will be marked as spam and deleted.
These methods will filter most spam emails. There are also some end-user practices that can help to protect your email account further.
- Stop showing your email address on your website or other websites.
Try to use an online form on your website. For more information, see Sending emails from a website using FormMail.pl - Use different email addresses for different purposes.
It will reduce the risk of exposing your personal email address to the spammers. - Disable “catchall” setting in Toolkit.
“catchall” is a wildcard email account. It will catch all of the emails addressed to the email accounts that do not exist. For example, if a sender misspelled your email address in an email, the email will be delivered to your “catchall” account. However, if spam senders make up a random email address under your domain name and send spam to it, you will receive them as well. For information on how to disable the “catchall”, see Configuring an email address to bounce all messages - Watch out for the check boxes when signing up for services.
When you buy things or services online, be careful with the “subscribe me” check box or similar check boxes as they are often selected by default. It might allow companies to send you newsletters that you don’t want, or even allow them to sell or give your email address to the third-party companies. - Avoid replying to spam emails.
Doing this will only confirm that your email address is live. It will lead more spam emails to you.
