Backscatter Spam

One of the areas where spam detection and filtering has always been difficult is with bounce backs - AKA backscatter. It's very difficult to scan these as they sometimes don't include all of the original message rendering heuristics ineffective (where AI reads and understands the message), and always include a header specific to the mail server it was sent from so that signature based scanning doesn't work. Every type and version of mail server attaches a different header making it difficult to detect what is and isn't a bounce.

Fundamentally, this is only a problem because some mail servers are badly configured and accept mail when they shouldn't. I can't change that.

Our solution:
The RocketUK mail servers now have the ability to detect and score and bounces. For the reasons above this is not infallable but has proved effective in testing.

378 out of 439 bounces received between midnight and 9:30am were marked or blocked as spam.
Previously, most of those would have been passed as clean.

The benefits:
This will markedly reduce the amount of junk bounce backs our customers receive.
I am unaware of any other ISPs having implemented this type of scanning.

Mail Server Quotas

We've always said that we have a mail quota but this has never been enforced.
We're now introducing quotas on mailboxes of 100MB. This affects almost no customers - 95% use POP3 and never leave more an a couple of MB on the server before downloading.

What is does mean is that we're able to provide more IMAP/WebMail services - where the users leave their mail on our servers rather than downloading to their own computers.
This is ideal for people who are more often mobile and don't have an office server looking after email.

Another mail filter

To reduce spam: in testing is a new filter ('policyd') which will analyse the patterns of other computers on the net sending us email. If the patterns match spam behavoir or they are caught sending spam we can automatically blacklist them for long periods of time.
Currently, hosts can't be automatically blacklisted.

Every search engine should obtain permission from a website before copying its pages or even snippets of text, according to a ruling by a Belgian court today.

For the full article clickhere

Today we had our new UPS delivered which will cover all apparatus within the server room. No more rack mounted APC units required!
This is linked from the generator circuits meaning that in the event of power failure the 8 seconds between cut off and auto generator (during output balancing) everything is kept working.

New UPS

Microsoft is getting tougher on UK businesses and threatening legal action using its agents the Business Software Alliance (BSA) for companies that do not comply with requests to keep their software licenses up to date.

Under the new program, if Microsoft doesn't receive a response after 14 days, the company will send a succession of three "escalation" letters over three weeks. The last two letters warn that the case could be turned over the BSA, which could pursue legal action.

If you're unsure of your current licensing status give us a call on 01952 588688 for advice.
Midland Computers are Microsoft Partners supplying official UK license products.

For the first time in a while, a fairly large virus outbreak is in progress. Take a look at our statistics for mid-January 2007 and you can see the big spikes as trojan containing emails are spammed out en-masse. Our anti-spam service seems to have done an excellent job stopping them coming in.

This is a good time to double check you anti-virus subscriptions are up to date - whatever these files might be installing on your computers, it'll not be friendly...