is anti spam working?

[#1]

You want to try 300-400 a day
But seriously if you haven't already done so and you have a spare hour try reading this to get a flavour of what's being done.

[#2]

Funny, since PN are trialing a new Spam solution the amount of spam being received by users has gone through the roof. Do they turn off the spam detectors to make the new system look good.......?
hmmm paranoid or what...............!!
I'am in the process of dumping PN and going to BT.
6 months now - not one spam email received!!! Bliss.
(Isn't PN part of BT..........?)
So long

[#3]

Can someone at PN tell me whether it is worth continuning to mark anything as spam? I've been doing it for two months day in day out and the spam hasn't decreased and the filter is still soooo bad.
For comparison I downloaded POPfile from sourceforge. trained on 25 emails and now about 1% error rate.
Thats 1 in 100 marked wrongly!
This week PN caught 110 spam and missed 200.
Seriously guys you've got yourself one huge problem and people are leaving over it. It ruins an otherwise good service.

[#4]

On a similar note, I havereceived a couple of emails recently which appear to be sent from ME!  Is this a trick used bythe spammers?  I am a little worried that my email address my then become blocked.  I hope this is just a loophole with Outlook.  Chris.

[#5]

Don't worry too much about it.
Email is just like a postcard.
Everybody who sees the message could read its contents.
The person sending the message can write whatever they like as 'senders address'
The sender can of course write any address on the postcards 'to address' even making up addresses if they like.
Equally, they may know a house address exists, then just make up names for people they think 'might' be living there. (hence the recommendations to turn off the catch-all address)

[#6]

Is there actually any point in raising this as a ticket with support - or will I get the usual "see this link, see that link blah blah" without really addressing the problem. I was thinking of signing up to a 12M contract, but I don't think I'll bother.

[#7]

Depsite all the positives that you read about Plus, and not just on their own website, the fact is they are doing little toprevent spam. I rasied an issued via the 'help & Support pages at 10:39 on the 05/01/089 and asave to advise me on the 07/01/08 it was now with the right place I have heard nothing.
Still getting many spam emails, set up a spam folder in webmail as the puls site tells me that will help 'post spam to the folder. Nother. this despite sending several hundred emails to the spam@despamchecker.plus.com account. It is supposed to train the spam filters. it's failing.
430 if you have not committed yourself then don't. I'm stck in a 12m agreeemnt at the moment so difficult to move, but my recent experience would support such an action.
Plus over the past year have not been that effective in keeping our data secure (april 07) and now don't even bother to deal with compliants. Will escalte this to The Internet Services Providers' Association (ISPA UK) - http://www.ispa.org.uk/about_us/
A good reputation is being ruined by ineffective management. Mud sticks, it will be long time before I have any confidence in thiis company.

[#8]

Hi Rodge,
Bob is going to be posting a lengthy update on the next steps that we will be taking in regards to spam over the next day or so.
Please don't thinking that we're doing nothing to precent spam.  you couldn't be any further from the truth.

[#9]

Please don't lock down MXCore and MXLast until everyone is safely under Postini's wing.
My domain is still outside and I don't want to get lock out in the cold

[#10]

Tonight I recieved 482 spam emails.
WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?

[#11]

... and a further 16 since that last post.

[#12]

Are they "failed delivery notifications"
B.

[#13]

Quote from: 430

could someone please explain to a thicko like me why I am being inundated with spam. Ever since Plus let the cat out of the bag, its been gradually increasing. Prior to that event, it was nil. Now its 20-30 per day.

Spam is on the rise. It's a trend that seems to arise around the same time each year. Year on year it also gets progressively worse. This makes quite interesting reading.

Quote

Surely Plus must see hundreds of messages to its customers each day from the same email address (or whatever other way there is of identifying the source)? Is it beyond reasonable for Plus to block these? Or does each individual spam message to each individual address originate from a unique source?

There are many reasons why it's not quite as cut and dry as that. To an outsider, it's easy to look at an email and think "How could the filter possibly miss that?", but trust me getting a machine to do what a human does especially with the ever evolving tricks that spammers use is easier said than done. It was written a while ago but I find this whitepaper does quite a good job of explaining what we're up against.

Quote

Its getting to be a real PIA.

Believe me fighting it's just as much a PITA as receiving the stuff.

Quote from: Sanders83

Are plusnet going to do anything about it?

Absolutely! Everyone should have received an email from us about the recent rises in spam and hopefully that has gone some way to explaining that we've been investing a *lot* of time and effort in partnering a new anti-spam platform with Postini. There is certainly light at the end of the tunnel.

Quote from: munnsters

Funny, since PN are trialing a new Spam solution the amount of spam being received by users has gone through the roof. Do they turn off the spam detectors to make the new system look good.......? hmmm paranoid or what...............!!

I'd suggest giving this post a read that explains why you may not be seeing any immediate benefit at the moment.

Quote from: stswithins

Can someone at PN tell me whether it is worth continuning to mark anything as spam? I've been doing it for two months day in day out and the spam hasn't decreased and the filter is still soooo bad.

Which is why we're replacing it
We'll be continuing to train the existing filters over the next week or so but it won't be long before we switch this off and let Postini start marking emails as [-SPAM-].

Quote from: Rodge

Depsite all the positives that you read about Plus, and not just on their own website, the fact is they are doing little toprevent spam. I rasied an issued via the 'help & Support pages at 10:39 on the 05/01/089 and asave to advise me on the 07/01/08 it was now with the right place I have heard nothing.

I'm sorry but I can't agree with the statement that we're doing nothing. We've been working for months now on the trialling and implementation of a new anti-spam platform. OK, some of the benefits are yet to be seen but as I've already mentioned there is light at the end of the tunnel. Take this into consideration...
We' currently have around half of our customers on the new Postini platform. We haven't switched the subject line filtering on yet (the bit that adds the [-SPAM-] tag) but Postini is blocking a lot of email from even getting to these customers. Bear in mind that we process approximately 27 million emails *every day* most of which are spam.
During the last 24 hours the new Postini platform processed 17,085,886 emails. Of these emails only 3,728,633 were forwarded to customers. The rest were rejected as spam. That's 78.2% of email our servers rejected as spam before it even got to customers' mailboxes!
If you're not a Force9, Free Online or Metronet customer (they've already been moved) and haven't done so already, then ask to be moved to the Postini platform.
I see your ticket's been answered now. Apologies for the time it took for a response.

Quote from: Strat

Please don't lock down MXCore and MXLast until everyone is safely under Postini's wing. My domain is still outside and I don't want to get lock out in the cold

There's a script that runs 7 days after you're moved to Postini that does this, so you won't have the blocking applied unless your domains are on the Postini platform.

Quote from: Richard_261

Tonight I recieved 482 spam emails. WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?

I'd strongly suggest you follow the advice here. You have a single mailbox with your catch-all switched on. There are plenty of things you can do using the Manage My Mail tools to signifcantly reduce these numbers. let me know if you want any further help.

[#14]

Bob, I have to say I find your attitude rather dismissive. You may all be running around 24/7 to try to fix the problem, but from a customers point of view, we are still being bombarded, so you have therefore failed dismally.
I never received spam through PN until earlier this year when they gave out my information - and that includes last Christmas, so that rather blows your theory out of the water.
To be honest, I don't really care if its a PIA to you - your're the pro's, its your job to sort things like this. Don't come on here whingeing about it - sort it out. Walk the walk, don't talk the talk.
As for my contract, there's no way I'm going to tie myself into a 12 month deal with PN now. More likely to move unless this situation improves dramatically in the next couple of weeks.

[#15]

@430
I can assure you that the outlook for the detection of spam is looking every bit as good as Bob suggests. I've just posted some stats to the Usergroup forums which show how well Postini is performing in identifying spam:

---

Updated counts on the performance of Postini in identifying spam on some compromised email addresses. These were all being blackholed mostly because they were harvested on 'spam day', but there are a couple of others which were scraped off my website before I new about munging the email links. They only receive spam. I've now set up a specific mailbox and made all the compromised addresses aliases of that mailbox.
I am counting:

• Spam 1 - Plusnet added X-pn-pstn: Spam 1 present


• Spam 2 - Plusnet added X-pn-pstn: Spam 2 present


• qtine (X-pstn-neptune-rslt: qtine without Spam 1/2)


• Missed (not identified as spam by Postini)

Not included are the spams totally rejected by Postini - but based on the post here by Bob Pullen, 3/4 of the spam directed at my email addresses never reaches me.
So far the totals are:

+-	----------	-+-	------	+
|	Type	|	Count	|
+-	----------	-+-	------	+
|	Spam 1	|	0	|
|	Spam 2	|	378	|
|	qtine	|	52	|
|	Missed	|	4	|
+-	----------	-+-	------	+
|	Total	|	434	|
+-	----------	-+-	------	+

Apart from the forum notifications, I have not found any emails in any of my mailboxes wrong identified as spam by Postini.
Edit: Correct finger trouble with the figures!