Anti-Spam Measures

Everybody knows the annoyance of opening his inbox and having dozens of spam in it. These unwanted mails could be deleted by hand, but it would be much neater to not have them delivered at all or at least have them presorted into an extra folder. That's why we have taken several measures to reduce the frequency of delivery of spam mails to our server:

• Checks before delivery to our server: Spammers often try to conceal their identity. If this is not done carefully the attempt can be discovered before actually recieving the mail and thus the mail can be rejected. The sender's mail server is then notified accordingly.
• Blocklists: There are different lists of servers that are known to frequently spread spam available on the internet. Mails originating from these servers get rejected, too. However, it sometimes happens that mail servers (from big, well-known providers, too) are mislisted. Therefore we use a somewhat more complex variant that compares different blacklists and also uses additional information to assess whether the server is trustworthy or not. In case the mail gets rejected the sending server will be notified that mails are not accepted due to such an entry, as well.
• Content Checking: Accepted mails are subsequently checked by the program "SpamAssassin". As spammers often advertise for certain products, some phrases and product names are almost exclusively used in spam mails. SpamAssassin analyzes the contents of mails and tests for - amongst other criteria - certain keywords and also checks whether similar mails have previously been reported as spam. A mail identified as (probable) spam is tagged and then delivered to you inbox.

In spite of these efforts a perfect protection cannot be achieved, as there are always some spammers able to conceal their identity. Blocklists have a certain response time as well, and spammers know about programs like SpamAssassin, of course. Additionally, not all members of ASAMNet recieve the same amount and/or type of spam, which makes it very difficult to distinguish between spam and legitimate mail traffic. When using to narrow margins there is always the danger of rejecting normal, potentially urgent mails as spam. Therefore rather more (potential spam) mails are accepted. However, you have the possibility to use individual, more strict rules to classify spam for your inbox. More information can be found here.