One of my favourite things about the new Ironport platform we have implemented to combat spam on our networks is how it uses a reputation based system to determine how to handle incoming mail.
Update: This article now has an updated Frequently Asked Questions page that supersedes this announcement. You can find this latest information in our IronPort anti-spam migration FAQ
Those of you who managed to catch the teaser posted by our Network Director Phil Webb a couple of days ago, will already be aware that we’ve got a lot in store for the Plusnet email platform over the coming months.
One of the things we’re really excited about is our newly found partnership with security experts IronPort, who’s technology we’ll be using to bring you some of the best spam and virus filtering the industry has to offer.
Other improvements include the the long awaited replacement to our current Webmail platform, and a complete overhaul of both our inbound and outbound email platforms. More…
If, like me, you’ve seen a recent increase in spam emails relating to ‘breaking news’ from both CNN and MSNBC you might be interested to know they are related to a potential flaw in how Firefox displays Flash based adverts.
If you click the URL in the email, you’ll be taken to a website aiming to exploit this by putting a rogue URL in your clipboard, so next time you paste a link in and click ‘go’ you’ll be taken to a site advertising rogue anti-virus software.
More details available at the Beeb: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7567889.stm
It’s been a while since we last provided an update about our anti-spam platform back at the beginning of February. Since then you’d be forgiven for thinking that it’s all been a bit quiet on spam front, but rest assured we’ve definitely not been been resting on our laurels. Over the last two months our developers and network engineers have been busy beavering away at the configuration, code and script changes that will allow us to introduce the functionality promised when we last blogged about the subject.
You may recall back in November we announced our partnership with email security experts Postini. We’ve steadily been migrating customers across to the new anti-spam platform and we now have just under three quarters of our customers with their email being filtered by the new Postini systems. More…
It should be no secret by now that we are currently in the midst of migrating all of our customers over to a new anti-spam platform that we have been developing in conjunction with Postini.
Spam has been a very hot topic in our forums of late and our Customer Support Centre have also reported large increases in the number of customers who are getting in touch to report spam related problems.
A lot of customers have already been moved to Postini, but the work is a multi-stage project and some customers have been unsure what to expect after migration. Many may not know that they’re on the new platform yet, whilst others will be curious as to when their accounts will be getting migrated. This blog post is intended to clear up a lot of this confusion, answer some of the more commonly asked questions and provide an overall update regarding the progress of the project…
More…
Spam is a major issue for every user and every provider of email. Running an effective email platform is a major challenge for us, and despite a lot of investment the spam situation only seems to have got worse. We know that many customers have seen an increase in the amount of spam received, particularly in the last month.
Christmas is always a busy time for spammers and they have refined their tactics to try and get around spam filters (even though to you and I the emails are obviously still spam). In November we announced a partnership with Postini, who are widely regarded as one of the world’s leaders in the fight against spam.
*For the latest Postini anti-spam developments please see the more recently published update that can be found here*
This blog is designed to give you an overview of Postini’s insights into the previous month’s spam.
I’m hoping to provide you all with a blog similar to this one each month, showing the previous month’s trend in spam messages.
In a somewhat bus like moment, two customer trials were announced yesterday. Both trials, one for a new Spam management solution and the other a new Broadband Phone service, will be available to all customers on an opt-in basis. Registrations for both trials are now being accepted.
*For the latest Postini anti-spam developments please see the more recently published update that can be found here*
Spam is undeniably one of the biggest challenges we face as a service provider when it comes to building a reliable, stable and dependable email platform that our customers can rely on. Some have even argued that the ever increasing torrent of unsolicited email that now plagues the Internet has almost brought question to the usefulness of email as a reliable tool altogether.
Providing bandwidth, dealing with all the problems caused by spam (not least mail delays!) and maintaining constant house-keeping regimes is extremely costly. Spammers are continuously changing their techniques to circumvent the anti-spam precautions providers put in place, and things are made extremely difficult due to the lack of consistency in the way different email servers are set up around the globe.
So what does this mean I hear you cry? Are you turning email off? Well, fortunately enough I don’t think it’s quite come to that, although we would like to ask for your help…
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