Spam Free Email

I was talking with a good friend of mine last night and he made comment about how the only way that spam will disappear is when the lawmakers get more spam than they can handle themselves that they make it illegal.

While I see his point, the fact that the Internet is a global network makes legislation impractical to solve such a large problem. In fact I would think it would have about as much success as the war on drugs.

Innovation is the correct direction to move in to resolve the issues at hand. Finding the flaws and fixing them as well as sincere blocking of messages and servers that are not keeping with the times.

Technologies like SPF and bayesian filters will make more of a difference on a global scale than any legislation that comes out of any single country.

The bottleneck is not currently technology, it is the implementation of technology. If more companies would implement SPF in their DNS records alone, not even adding an SPF component to their incoming email server, spam and viruses would be reduced.

This is not a battle to completely obliterate the enemy, this is a game that we need only play to a stalemate. Our email systems are in place for a reason; to communicate with others. Spammers are in business because they exploit our desire to communicate with others.

Reduce a spammer’s ability to communicate with the email users on your email server and you have effected his bottom line. Accomplish this without impacting your users ability to communicate with the people they want to communicate with and your users will be happy.

It was around three weeks ago that I completely implemented the MailToaster into SimpleApps and started using this configuration for my own personal email.

I use to wake up to about 50 spam message every morning, now it is down to about 10. That may not sound like the results that one might expect, but I had spent a good deal of time working on my own filters and using RBLs.

So this is proof to me that the MailToaster really does what it says and is a great email server for just about anywhere.

I did some quick SPF testing this morning and set the new MailToaster to fail messages when they do not come from the correct SPF designated servers. I’ve also got SPF setup on my major domain names now, including:

* spamfreeemail.com
* simpleenigma.com
* homelocator.com
* spiderhunter.com

and several more domains.

I usually get several PayPal.com scam messages a week, so we’ll see how well SPF work by how many of these I will get over the next week or so…

I just finished rewriting the web based email software for SimpleApps so that it now supports an IMAP back-end.

I did this for a few reason. First and foremost I was trying to get anti-spam and anti-virus support for this domain. This is working now

Next I wanted to use a complete email system that was under current development. I choose the MailToaster and I’m quite happy with it.

I choose IMAP to solve a few problems which ended up creating a few of their own. Cold Fusion does not natively support IMAP, even though it uses JavaMail as the core of it’s email engine. JavaMail does support IMAP, so I wrote a Cold Fusion CFC as a wrapper for JavaMail to gain the access I needed. (I’ve been working on this, on and off, for about two weeks now)

I’m pretty happy with this so far and I think I’m going to be even happier when this web site is moved onto new servers. If anyone is interested in the Cold Fusion CFC for JavaMail let me know. I’d love to have others use it too, even if it is pretty raw at the moment.