Over the past several months we’ve watched a marked increase in the spam making its way through our filtering.  And we’re not alone.  Spam volume has increased over 6 times since October 2013 globally and many spammers have become increasingly sophisticated in thwarting filters, explicitly testing and tuning delivery through common systems to ensure their spam reaches their targets.  In response, we’ve completed several upgrades that have had a big impact reducing spam in our inboxes.
We finished a migration to our next generation MX servers last week.  The new MX servers feature a completely rewritten custom policy enforcement engine.  Like most MX filters, it makes heavy use of a collection of reputation services in conjunction with policies like rate limits and checks for basic compliance.  There’s one important difference with the new system: it only allows customers to opt-out of the filtering where our old MX filters allowed for some per user customization.  When a customer opts out, we’ll make our “best effort” at excluding a customer’s inbox from any filtering.
We’ve also made a couple of  important changes to our SpamAssassin installation including the integration of a commercial plugin.  This, along with a redoubled effort to maintain our own set of custom rules, has significantly increased its accuracy. We hope these changes have made as big an impact on your inbox as they have on ours.
Customers may opt-out of the new MX filters and adjust their SpamAssassin preferences using the Spam Configuration membertool.  Please join us in the forums if you have any questions.
-Kelsey
HUZZAH,,,
At long last Sonic takes spam filtering seriously! I noticed a huge decrease in my spam (previously averaging 250+ per day.). I actually thought something was wrong and I was losing email. Delighted to hear it is because real spam is really been destroyed. Spam was a huge threat to the Internet – second only to ATT. Third Verizon , fourth gmail, and then the FCC not necessarily in that order.
Thanks guys! And girls! But don’t stop now. Privatizing the Internet is being attempted daily by we all know who. Like TV was supposed to be a communication miracle that was to revolutionize society and guess what… It did. TV became the modern mind control of whoever can buy the time. PBS notwithstanding. (they have more commercials than commercial TV. They just distribute them differently).
Anyway that’s my ROD – Rant of the Day.
GO SONIC.
Best,
Bill