Spam.

I Hate spammers.

This week they almost managed to kill the two free reading networks that I've worked on for years.

According to our host we are getting 10 emails a second (during peak activity) to both.

I've spent a good portion of this week looking for solutions to the problem...most of them cost LOTS of money, on a monthly basis.

One thing that would solve it is to sign up with a filtering service that would have the email redirected to them, filter out spam and invalid mail (to addresses we no longer have...which is where a majority of the mail is going to) and then send it on to our mail servers. They charge by the user by the month....cheapest I found was 50 cents a box a month. (with nearly 200 addresses ...you do the math)
(and it's hard to find that type of service doing a google search..you have to wade through lots of anti spam software and solutions for personal use.

Another solution was to redirect the mail to a service that just does email...(well over $100 a month for what we would need) (easier to find but more expensive)

The solution our host suggested (and has yet to give us a price on) is a dedicated mail server for just those domains.

We hit upon a solution earlier today...it will be a pain, but it will pay off in NO Spam.. (at least for a while)

Changing our domain names.
Set the old domains to redirect web pages to the new domains.
Change the MX entries on the current domains to localhost.

(Which is how WE found out about the problem, our host did that to try to stem the flood, cutting off ALL our email except internal.)

Clients wind up on the correct site and then are given the new email addresses when they fill out the forms, and any email sent to the old domains gets told that they don't exist. We can inform our readers of ways to avoid getting their new addresses on spam lists.

It's a hard hit to lose domains that we've had for years (well...not lose, but we sure can't USE them) but it is not the death blow it could have been if we couldn't derail the spammers.

Hopefully our Board of Directors will like the solution and I can get started on it this weekend...get things going by Thanksgiving. Lots to do if the approve it.

Spammers need experience pain...lots of pain.

Spam.

I Hate spammers.

This week they almost managed to kill the two free reading networks that I've worked on for years.

According to our host we are getting 10 emails a second (during peak activity) to both.

I've spent a good portion of this week looking for solutions to the problem...most of them cost LOTS of money, on a monthly basis.

One thing that would solve it is to sign up with a filtering service that would have the email redirected to them, filter out spam and invalid mail (to addresses we no longer have...which is where a majority of the mail is going to) and then send it on to our mail servers. They charge by the user by the month....cheapest I found was 50 cents a box a month. (with nearly 200 addresses ...you do the math)
(and it's hard to find that type of service doing a google search..you have to wade through lots of anti spam software and solutions for personal use.

Another solution was to redirect the mail to a service that just does email...(well over $100 a month for what we would need) (easier to find but more expensive)

The solution our host suggested (and has yet to give us a price on) is a dedicated mail server for just those domains.

We hit upon a solution earlier today...it will be a pain, but it will pay off in NO Spam.. (at least for a while)

Changing our domain names.
Set the old domains to redirect web pages to the new domains.
Change the MX entries on the current domains to localhost.

(Which is how WE found out about the problem, our host did that to try to stem the flood, cutting off ALL our email except internal.)

Clients wind up on the correct site and then are given the new email addresses when they fill out the forms, and any email sent to the old domains gets told that they don't exist. We can inform our readers of ways to avoid getting their new addresses on spam lists.

It's a hard hit to lose domains that we've had for years (well...not lose, but we sure can't USE them) but it is not the death blow it could have been if we couldn't derail the spammers.

Hopefully our Board of Directors will like the solution and I can get started on it this weekend...get things going by Thanksgiving. Lots to do if the approve it.

Spammers need experience pain...lots of pain.