Every few minutes, a spam email drops in my mailbox ... and indeed every five minutes or so throughout the day, our server rejects an email that is so obviously, undeniably spam that it doesn't even bother to notify us of its arrival. This is a long-running graph showing spam (red) and delivered to our mailboxes (blue) on a daily basis. Our filters are tuned to pass things through to us if there's any doubt - we're an organisation that welcomes new customers, and they often introduce themselves by email, and with a none-obvious title line (such as "Hi").
But looking at my inbox this morning, there's a gap of over an hour when I didn't get a single email! Oh - I see - it's spring and the clocks have gone forward ... and that was the missed hour.
We use SpamAssassin to do our primary filtering, and a Perl script run within our mail client to then log the emails marked as Spam. The graph at the top of this item is produced by the gd module running within PHP. I wouldn't advocate that customers follow our lead and mix languages like this - we've used them both because we provide both
Perl Programming Courses and
PHP training classes ... using both languages ourselves for real solid and substantial work.
(written 2010-03-28)
Associated topics are indexed as below, or enter http://melksh.am/nnnn for individual articles
G909 - Well House Consultants - Spam, Spamming and Spammers [259] Responding to spam - (2005-03-27)
[268] Information request forms, cleaning up spam - (2005-04-05)
[276] An apology to Mr Boneparte - (2005-04-11)
[338] OO techniques are hard to teach - (2005-06-06)
[347] Frightening and from-friend viruses and spams - (2005-06-14)
[417] Telephone Preference Service - we're registered - (2005-08-17)
[495] More spam - a success story - (2005-11-13)
[872] Email metrics - (2006-09-20)
[1037] Impact Engineering and Backscatter - (2007-01-16)
[1115] Unexpected visitors to our site - (2007-03-22)
[1523] Ive just received an email from myself. Should I be worried? - (2008-01-29)
[1532] Comment spam blocked. Please comment via Forums - (2008-02-05)
[1763] Co-operating to save, yet we dont - (2008-08-21)
[1817] Marc Schneider is still having email trouble - (2008-09-30)
[1978] From spam to mod_alias - finding resources - (2009-01-05)
[2019] Baby Caleb and Fortune City in your web logs? - (2009-01-31)
[2177] Preventing forum spam - checks at sign up - (2009-05-12)
[2179] Offers that I can refuse - (2009-05-12)
[2276] Who is Marc Schneider of Multilingual Search Engine Optimization Inc - (2009-07-10)
[2398] Websitemediasolution and a goldfish called Carl Johnson - (2009-09-06)
[2884] Hotlinked images onto adult material sites - (2010-07-23)
[3016] The legal considerations of your web presence - revisited - (2010-10-26)
[3166] Well house is strong - confirmed? - (2011-02-11)
[3190] What do the following web sites have in common? - (2011-03-03)
[3316] Twitter Phishing Trips ... and a great new alert service - (2011-06-04)
[3352] World Trade Register - Certainly NOT worth 2985 Euros. - (2011-07-09)
[3506] Cold call contacts - preference services and turning off spam sales approaches - (2011-11-03)
[3661] Keeping forum and blog comments clean - (2012-03-19)
[3910] Identifying your real customers and keeping them well informed fast - (2012-11-02)
[3912] Sand to Arabia, Coals to Newcastle or Woodburners to Russia - (2012-11-04)
[3946] Moving from a warning system to a control system - PHP, forum spammers - (2012-12-07)
[4135] Introducing your product to Well House Consultants - single, personally tuned email please - (2013-07-08)
[4315] Welcoming genuine forum posters quickly - but turning away off topic advertisers - (2014-11-16)
[4520] No cold sales calls please - but delighted to hear from others! - (2015-09-29)
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