February 2005 - Special Edition

Hello Everyone,

Over the past month, we have had more clients voicing concerns about spam. It is not your imagination, the amount of spam has skyrocketed over the past couple of months, and it is going to get worse. Spammers have found a new method of getting past spam filters.

Our spam filters are deleting a lot of spam, however, we know a lot still gets thru:

Past 7 days 462,869 spam emails have been refused as spam
Past 7 days 268,921 emails have been marked and delivered as possible spam
Past 7 days 15,444 emails were accepted as not spam and delivered

According to these numbers, only 2.06% of emails our servers receive are true emails, the rest, 97.94% are SPAM!

If you wish to read about what is happening yourself, here are some good links:

http://news.com.com/Experts+Zombie+trick+set+to+send+spam+sky-high/2100-7349_3-5560664.html?tag=nefd.topp

http://spam.abuse.net/

We are not sure what the solution to all the new spam is yet. Every ISP is wrestling with it, but it may take a complete re-vamp of the email system to fix the problem permanently, and that is a daunting task.

For those using Microsoft products, they claim that their latest email clients, Outlook and Outlook Express have mechanisms for fighting spam.

There are several products to add to your email client, of which we cannot recommend any particular one or method, but if you do a Goggle search for stop spam, you will find hundreds of products.

For many people, our new Zaep service will work wonders to get rid of your spam. We would like to offer this to everyone for free, however, we have to pay for licenses to use the technology. It is for this reason that we are only charging $14.95 per year/per email address for the service. However, Zaep will not work for everyone. Email addresses on web sites that are intended to draw new clients may find Zaeps Challenge and Response system too restrictive. http://www.jtmweb.com/zaep.html

Zaep Testing: On my personal email account, Zaep has stopped 815 spam emails over the past 30 days (all 815 had been missed by the email servers spam filters), and let thru a total of 74 valid emails. I have also received 6 emails I did not want, but they got thru because the spammer personally replied to the challenge.

Just wanted everyone to know that they are not imagining that spam is getting worse, we agree, and are doing our best to find a solution.