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Anti-Spam Services
How the ITX Anti-Spam Services Work
Spam Control, as ITX has implemented it, is a means by which we identify unsolicited and/or potentially harmful email before it ever hits your mailbox or the mailbox of anyone in your organization. We filter or identify over 98% of messages, with almost no false positives. We do this through 5 separate mechanisms:
- Behavior checking. When we detect that the sending server intends to blast ITX's clients with spam, we shut off the connection.
- Blacklist checking. We check with several high-quality blacklists to make sure that mail being sent to you through our servers is not coming from a known source of spam, and we reject these messages before they come into the server.
- Content checking. We run a scan on the content of each message to make sure that there are no references to spammer's websites, or websites that might be used for phishing (such as the now infamous ebay and Citibank emails). We reject these messages from coming into the server.
- Heuristic (pattern-matching) checks - we run messages through over 35,000 known patterns that help us to identify messages that might be sent in large volumes, and tag the messages.
- Keyword checking - we use a common list of obvious words that normally only appear in spam, and tag the message.
- Anti-virus control. We use two anti-virus applications to help filter out possible viruses.
It is important to understand how the anti-spam system works so that it can stay effective. Here are a few tools that you have available to you to help increase its effectiveness:
- Never ever ever reply to a spammer. This is very important because the anti-spam mechanism automatically whitelists those to whom you send mail. This defeats the purpose of the filtering mechanism, and also tells the spammer that you actually exist. The outcome of this is that you will be likely to receive even more spam when they sell your email address to all of their friends.
- If you want to have a sender whitelisted, go to our whitelisting page. Instructions for this are available at http://www.itx.net/support/Mail_Hosting_Whitelisting_34.asp.
- Be careful how you use your email address. If you aren't sure of the sender, use a free service, such as yahoo mail, gmail, or hotmail.
Our policy is to not delete mail to any of our subscribers. This is important, as some of our customers have asked us to reduce the volume of mail coming into their mailboxes by purging this email. We recommend that users activate a filter on their client software to accomplish this. Here is a link to a pdf document providing instructions on how to do this with Microsoft Outlook 2000.
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