Email: Spam & viruses filtering

How does WebNexus filter out spam and viruses?
 

 There are rules that our servers follow to stop your inboxes from getting full of junk and viruses.

  1. We do practice the use of blacklists.  Specifically the dnsbl.njabl.org (Open mail relay servers), sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org (Known spammers virus senders), bl.spamcop.net (a real time blacklist controlled by the amount of spam users report to them), relays.ordb.org (another open relay list).
  2. The following file types are dropped completely.  These are executables in some respect and hazardous.  If someone needs to send you a file of this type they can zip it and it will be allowed to pass as long as it passes the virus filters.  .bat, .chm, .cmd, .com, .do, .hta, .jse, .rm, .scr, .pif, .vbe, .vbs, .vxd, .xl, and .cpl
  3. Files with a .exe extension are rejected back to the user.  These files need to be zipped and will pass our server checks in that form as long as they pass virus and spam filters.
  4. Viruses are immediately quarentined and held for 2 weeks before deleted.
  5. Spam.  Now this is a little tricky.  Most spam is blatant and we block that the same as viruses.  However you may also get email tagged with *****SPAM***** that is email that our servers aren't sure about so it passes it to you for you to check.
Those are the stages in which we clean out your mail.  Our spam filters are fairly light because we would prefer that you get a little bit of spam and all of your legitimate email instead of blocking some of the legitimate stuff.  With the above settings we successfully block about 95% of spam and viruses.  We have only had 5 cases in 3 years of legitmate mail being blocked by us.  We are always tweaking on the spam filtering as that constantly changes so the amount of spam we manage to filter does vary from time to time.
Last Updated ( Tuesday, 19 June 2007 )