Anti Spam Measures

IMPORT INFORMATION REGARDING SPAM PROTECTION OF YOUR EMAIL ACCOUNT As you are well aware, the fight against SPAM clogging up your email inbox is a constant annoyance and inconvenience. Spending your precious minutes looking through unwanted emails to find that communication you’ve been waiting for is time that could be spent more productively. With this in mind, InTouch Systems are rolling out the next stage of our SPAM Protection System over the next two weeks; we will be introducing more intelligent checks on incoming emails and more boundary protections to stop these emails hitting your inbox. For your information the figures below show the extent of the problems facing ISPs and in particular Mail Service Providers.   InTouch Systems Mail Servers 1-4 Totals for 1/1/2007 to 31/07/2007 Total Emails Received Rejected Email by Boundary Protection (DNSBL) Rejected Emails by Virus Protection Rejected by Anti-Spam Filters Quarantined Emails Total Emails Accepted and Delivered 2,886,354 470,156 96,854 1,400,251 299,801 826,839 These figures give you a better idea of the amount of unwanted emails received, compared to the amount that actually are delivered and indeed, the amount of SPAM is over double the amount of valid emails.   Extra Protection With this in mind, we have updated our servers to use the following extra protection to keep SPAM from your inbox; we already use DNS Blacklists, SpamAssassin and Greylisting (explanations of these can be found by Googling these phrases). Razor – A spam tracking online database and individual email level. Baysian Filters – intuitive self learning scoring system based on email text. Quarantine - User managed quarantine system with integrated blacklists and whitelists.   What does this mean for you?   There is one change that will affect your inbox. 1. If our automated system finds potential SPAM items, they will be Quarantined. You will receive an email from the InTouch Quarantine Service showing the details of these emails and you will be given the following options to proceed: a) Authorise – allow this email through and all future emails from the sender. b) Deliver – allow this email through but don’t authorise the sender. c) Blacklist - Delete this email and reject all future emails from the sender. d) Show Message - View the message in it's RAW format. e) Delete – Delete this email. What does this mean for senders? Senders of emails to you that are identified as potential SPAM may experience a delay in their email reaching you due to quarantining. NO EMAILS ARE DELETED OR REJECTED FROM OUR SERVERS WITHOUT A NOTIFICATION OF DELETION/REJECTION BEING RETURNED TO THE SENDER. 1. Emails containing viruses are deleted upon receipt and the sender is advised of this by a return email notification. 2. Emails can be temporarily rejected due to greylisting (see below) or permanently rejected due to exceptionally high spam scores, in these cases, the sender is advised by a return email notification. Greylisting This is a means of temporary email rejection to stop automated systems sending bulk emails through our servers. SPAMMERS automated email systems will try only once to deliver an email. If an email has not been received by a sender before it will be temporarily rejected by our servers for 1 minute. The Internet standards (RFC) state that all email servers should retry sending temporarily rejected emails at least once. Any valid emails would be retried and accepted by our servers after 1 minute. This will only happen once per sender. In the rare case of the senders’ email server not being RFC compliant, the email will be rejected back to the sender with a ‘please try later’ error message.   IN THESE CASES THE SENDER SHOULD BE ADVISED TO CONTACT THEIR ISP. WE CAN DO NOTHING IF THE SENDER’S ISP IS NOT RFC COMPLIANT.