Anti-Spam issues and Netstar Communications e-mail services

If you have an email address, at one point in time you will receive an unsolicited email also known as SPAM. And that is not just advertising, SPAM is used to send viruses, and a new term called phishing to lure people into websites that look legitimate but their sole purpose is to steal personal information.

SPAM is costly
Security experts say "E-mail is evolving into a hacking tool that threatens its usefulness for communications and commerce". An avalanche of junk e-mail, scams to filch personal information and sophisticated computer viruses cost more than $15 billion in personal losses and lost workplace productivity last year, market researchers say.

Our statistics show that only in the last 7 days (for just one of our servers), there has been over 3.64 million unsolicited email sent to our servers. Our servers have defeated over 38000 email viruses, have rejected over 63000 known spammers using real-time black hole lists and have blocked over 1.85 million spammers attacks trying to steal your email address from our server.

What is Netstar Communications doing about it?
Numerous Anti-Spam measures have been taken by Netstar Communications in the past 6 years to stop this type of email abuse. Our servers employ the latest slew of technological prevention systems to defeat these harmful emails. At this time we employ Bayesian Filtering, SpamAssassin, Challenge-Response Mechanism, Spam URI Real-time Block list, White and Black Lists, Email Content Filtering, HTML Filtering to name a few. To read about every and each of these filtering technologies, go to  How do we  protect your email from SPAM. But the most important one, Challenge-Response, is what we would like to discuss with you today.

What is Challenge-Response?
The best line of defense is a Challenge-Response mechanism, the most foolproof spam blocking method known to block 100% of computer-generated spam. If the SpamAssassin and Bayesian filters cannot definitively prove that a message is or is not spam, a challenge message is sent to the message originator. The sender is presented with an embedded link in the message. Once the user clicks on this link and enters the displayed code, their message and all of their future messages will be allowed.

This method will only do this once for anyone who is sending you an email. Once they respond to it you will be able to continue receiving mail from them with no further intervention from the mail server. This method will prevent computer generated mail, which is usually how millions of spam is generated daily, from reaching your email box.

What if I receive mail from mailing lists or computer generated lists that I do want to receive?
A well thought of method, usually keeps all the angles of a situation in mind, in order to become a solution. This is no different. In order for you to see who has sent you what and whether they have been marked for challenge-response, you have the option of seeing all the awaiting email using your web browsers. Simply connect to our web mail system with your username and password, and then click on settings. In that page click on challenge-response. You will see a list of all the pending email. You can either authorize them yourself, or wait for the sender do his/her part to become authorized to send you email.

Ok, what do I have to do next?
Well, the first thing is to decide whether or not you want this service. The service is free of charge and at this time is not mandatory for existing accounts. It is up to you to activate this service or not.
If you decide you want to activate this service, simply go to: How do we protect your email from SPAM article and set your premium email service feature. It is free of charge and makes your email a lot safer and more spam free.
In there, when you type your email address and password. You will be directed to another secure page to turn on these features  for your email box. Once you do this, anyone sending you email will receive a reply back to authorize themselves to send you email. It is recommended that you periodically check your challenge-response list to avoid losing any computer generated email that might be important to you.

What if I don't like this feature?
If you decide you do not want this service, there is another choice available to you. You can also use our "spam folder mode". What this does is that any email recognized by our servers as SPAM, can be moved into a folder called SPAM under your mailbox on our server. The only way to review these filtered email, is to log into the webmail service and review the folder called "Spam folder". By choosing this service you will receive only email that is not marked as SPAM by your regular email client, such as outlook. All other tagged (SPAM) email is stored on your webmail. This will probably cut about 80% of your daily SPAM.

Whichever method you will choose, we hope will help greatly with your email experience and will definitely help cutting down on the amount of SPAM you receive.

Netstar Communications and Internetworking, Inc.

 

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