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This week’s seen some promising developments in our ongoing battle with SPAM. So much so that I thought it only worthy of a blog post.

Last Friday we rolled out a number of configuration changes to one of the 8 mxlast mail delivery servers on the email platform. This allowed us to assess the potential impact the changes would have before rolling them out across the remaining servers. For anyone who hasn’t read it, specific details regarding what these changes entailed can be found in the forum post here.

Anyway, analysis after the changes to this one server proved very promising and saw a massive reduction in the volume of spam being delivered. On the back of this the changes were rolled out across the entire mxlast platform early this week.

Now for the interesting bit. The following figures are from last Tuesday’s analysis of all the mxlast delivery servers…

5334997 emails were processed by the platform in total that day. Of these 2190584 were blocked by our existing ACL’s, which leaves 3144413 emails.

Whilst we would expect a proportion of the remaining emails to be rejected due to things like bad sender addresses or failure to resolve the sender’s host name to an IP address, they all have the potential to end up in customers’ mailboxes. If you bear in mind that most of the email on the secondary mail servers is spam then that’s is a hell of a lot of junk, most of which would normally have been destined for the customer
Here’s the good bit! Due to the changes we made on Monday 1979411 of these 3144413 emails were blocked and not delivered to customers. That’s a reduction of 62.95% in the volume of spam being delivered to customers from our secondary mail servers! This basically means that customers should notice a reduction in the volumes of spam email being delivered to their address.

Fantastic news I’m sure you’ll agree and and combined with the changes to the way in which mailboxes are configured that rolled live this morning, we’ll have seen a significant dent in the volume of nuisance email being delivered by the mail platform come the end of the week

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This entry was posted by Bob Pullen on Thursday, April 19th, 2007 at 4:28 pm and is tagged with and is posted in the category Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.