Spam Free Email

I’ve been playing with the MailToaster for the better part of a week now. I’ve got one of them ready to go into a production environment at one of my client sites and a question is in my mind:

IMAP or POP3?

First off the users at this client site are use to POP3, and knowing the personalities this is why I will be setting things back up as POP3.

But what could IMAP give them that POP3 can’t?

The first thing I can think of is flexibility. With IMAP you can have all of your email on the server and you can use multiple computers to check the same email box. I do have one user that has been asking if this was possible, but I have been steering them away because of the way that they have been using POP3. Next time they ask I’ll have a better answer.

The next thing that I can think of is better integration with anti spam tools like SpamAssassin. When using IMAP, at least on the MailToaster, SpamAssassin has access to the spam folder. This allows SpamAssassin to train better for the user specific email patterns and gets rid of more spam that way.

I’ll come up with more reasons over time, but those two alone are making me think if I should bring this up to the client, or wait to train them again later ….

I’ve spent most of my day today fighting with a combination of virus and viruses. The virus downloads and installs the virus faster then I can remove it.

The virus also removes the hosts files on the PC making it impossible to be connected to the Internet and manually block the site that is being used to download the spyware from.

So I was thinking, why not create a DNS server that redirects known spyware requests to a spyware warning page instead of going to the page itself. On the second request, or after an acknowledgement, it could continue on the real page.

Of course this would take effort and resources to make it viable, and it could easily be used to try and block your competitors, but in the long run if no one can get to your website because you installed spyware, then you will not make any money. Remove the profit motive and you remove a significant number of the players.

A well designed system would be about as effective an an RBL is at blocking spam, but that is a 30 to 40% block ratio that could save a lot of time and resources.