Spammers and how to beat them

I don't know about you but our mail server receive tons of spam each day. Its used to be a constant battle to ensure that the tide of spam didn't drown out the real business mail. We decided to do something about it and get on with business instead of worrying about overflowing mail boxes. Before detailing the final solution we settled on here are some of the strategies we tried in the past.

We used to make use of dns black lists and of course spamassassin to fight of all the offers for fake rolex watches, viagra and something called calias. (What the hell is that?) We had to set our kill level to 5 in spamassassin to ensure that we stoped the enemy at the gates but there were always some that got through.

What I like about spamassassin is that you can run it on your local machine, if for example, your ISP doesn't run any effective filters on there server. (Got to feel sorry for those okes. People complain about the spam but if they stop one legitimate email about the 10 000 000 tender, due to their filtering rules, then they get blamed.) I know spamassassin integrates with Gnome's Evolution mail client.

Our second line of defense was to use Thunderbird. Thunderbird is a top notch email client that has excellent Junk Filtering built in. so you can just post those nasties off to /dev/null. It is really effective. I think if you are a windows user you can run clamav to check for viruses too! But the best solution we found is Mimecast.

Mimecast is the best solution

Still doing all this stuff yourself detracts from the important business stuff at hand. Thats when we met the Mimecast guys. A simple solution to a big problem. Mimecast. Its a product by a bunch of South Africans that takes the hassle out of fighting spam. It moers spam stukkend. We started using it in our office about a month ago, on a trial basis before we offer it to clients and it is great! All those spam emails hitting the mimecast server like bugs against a windshield of a formula 1 car!