Enough Is Enough for Email Spamming
Because the ever increasing problem of email spamming, we have decided to fight it on the server level. Why?
Because the spammers use all kinds of ways to send to any site hosted on our server - that is the case for any server. They do not have to know your correct email address to do this. Consider this….
Once you register a domain name, your contact information is listed with your domain name unless you hide it through a special private service that you have to pay extra to get. Your domain name and your contact info are there and anyone can access them using the whois request. They can harvest your other email addresses by searching for any text like “user@yourdomain.com” on your page - so do not put your email in text format anywhere on your website. They can sell your email address to others.
However, that is not the worse part for us, the web host. The worse part for the server is that they can use scripts to flood the server with emails sent to a non-existing email address at your site such as “whateverusername@yourdomain.com”
Their scripts can use a dictionary to come up with the part in front of the “@yourdomain.com” - they keep trying until the spam gets delivered.
Yes, you may not receive all these spam emails if you have disabled your catch-all email. But still the server has to take the load. And most of the times, the server hangs under heavy load and we have to reboot the server when this happens. Recently rebooting our servers become a daily task. Yesterday it complete crashed our server - if you expect to receive email from anyone yesterday, ask them to send it again.
We have decided to fight back!
On our DirectAdmin servers, we installed the SpamBlocker maintained by Jeff Lasman to fight spams headon and we have enabled it for all sites hosted on our servers.
SpamBlocker will check each email coming in and block it if the sender’s email address or the domain hosting that email is recognized by us or several third-party “blocklists” - we block it right away by bouncing a warning email with a subject “Mail delivery failed…” If the sender is indeed a legitimate client of your website but somehow his or her email has been blacklisted by one or several of the blocklists we use, he or she will find in that warning email a link to this webpage:
http://www.selfwebhosting.ws/emailblocked.php
and request to unblock his or her email address from our servers.
Let us know how this works for your site(s) hosted with us. Send us the email addresses that are blocked but you believe legitimate.