Neil Shearing’s Internet Marketing Strategies

Here’s the YouTube movie of my new solution for dealing with 42,365 spam emails per day…

For a larger version of the movie, please click here

Until a few days ago, I forwarded all my @scamfreezone.com email to my Gmail account and downloaded the filtered emails.

Unfortunately, Gmail got swamped. I had 1.27 MILLION emails in the spam folder. That’s an average of 42,365 hitting the account every day! The spams were taking up 5.7 GB of webspace.

But the real problem was that spams were slipping through the Gmail filters, and I was having to download them and delete them. I use Windows Mail on my desktop, and found its anti-spam “rules” to be clunky and difficult to use.

So I set up a new system, which I’m very happy with.

I created a Spam Arrest account and let it check the Gmail account. Spam Arrest checks incoming email against my whitelist of senders. Any sender who isn’t on my list gets sent a “challenge” email asking them to verify that they’re human.

I now download my emails from the Spam Arrest account, and I only get emails from people on my whitelist or people who’ve verified themselves.

For the next few days, I’m checking the Spam Arrest account via a web-browser, just to make sure it’s getting things right. So far it is… the stats are 190 emails processed, of which 115 were spam and 75 were good emails. So that’s already saved me from downloading and filtering the 115 from the 75.

(you may be thinking why didn’t I just miss out the Gmail account and set up Spam Arrest to get emails from the scamfreezone server. The answer is that I don’t think Spam Arrest would be happy sending out 42,365 challenge emails each day just for me! I also think Gmail’s spam filters are quite good, so it seems best to leave that working and have Spam Arrest work on the Gmail-filtered emails)

What do you think? Have you got a great anti-spam system? Could you improve on mine? Leave a comment below…

If you register domains and slap up websites with a quick sales letter, freebie giveaway or a bunch of articles for adsense… you’ll want to keep reading…

Go to your server admin area (usually Cpanel) and click on “List Accounts“, then look at the table containing all your domain names and find the column “Disk Used“.

If you’re like me, you’ll be in for a nasty surprise. Some of my websites which just had a few webpages were using up hundreds of megabytes of disk space.

How can that be?

It’s simple. All the pesky spam arriving at the email box was just sitting on the server, using up disk space.

Right now I’m deleting almost 60,000 spams… from just one account. They’re taking up almost 200Mb of space!

I cleaned two accounts yesterday, and have more to do. I guess I’ll free up over a gigabyte of space by doing this spring clean.

The next step is to enable SpamAssassin for each account (it’s under Mail Manager), set the score to a nice low number (I’m using 2 instead of the default 5) and click the link that says “To simply have the server DELETE and NOT deliver emails that are tagged as spam by SpamAssassin, click here now.”

Boom. Bye, bye spammers. Hello tons of extra server space.

I found this nifty plugin which allows me to check the blog comments for spams that managed to get past my filters.

It’s called Paged Comment Plugin.

It allows me to see *all* the comments at the blog, not just the last 20 (which is the Wordpress default).

With the amount of spam comments this blog gets (most of which are caught and not displayed), the last 20 comments page fills up really quickly. Now, thanks to this plugin, I can go back through previous pages of comments.

I’ve checked the last 300 comments. If anyone spots any spams elsewhere, please let me know.

Is anyone else getting hundreds of pieces of totally nonsensical spam?

An example would be, “amethystine deluxe, dividend bethesda astrology, butyrate approbation“.

There’s no link to click on… nothing’s being sold, so what’s the point of “Nonsense Spam”? Why would someone send junk email like that?

Well, if nothing’s being sold, there must be a value in actually sending the emails. Presumably, some mega-computer is analyzing the bounce messages from their mailout… the spammers can then work out which “Nonsense spam” emails were delivered and sell the email addresses.

It’s actually quite clever because it also hurts the Bayesian spam filters. If users label these “Nonsense spam” emails as junk to a third party such as Cloudmark, the filter will consider the words and context of the email when building its algorithm. So if actual users feed the filter random junk, the algorithm will, presumably, become less effective.

So the spammers get a list of deliverable email addresses as well as hurting the spam filters.

When something goes wrong with my regular email account (which does happen once in a while… especially when I’ve had my online business for a decade), I switch to my Gmail account. (Here’s where to sign up for an account)

Sometimes, it’s not even that something goes wrong with my email account, it may be that an email from my server doesn’t get through to the customer for whatever reason (over-zealous spam filters, spam blacklists). With a Gmail account, I can log in and try to get an email through to the customer a second way… and potentially get to the customer before they get concerned that I’ve “taken their money but not sent the product”.

I used my Gmail quite extensively after my server died. As soon as I got the domain up and running again I just forwarded all email going to “anything @ scamfreezone.com” to my Gmail account.

But, Gmail isn’t as good at filtering out spam as the Cloudmark Desktop plugin I had running in Outlook.

Hmmm, what to do?

Well, fortunately, Gmail allows you to access your email via POP (meaning you don’t have to actually log in to your Gmail account via your web-browser, you can login and manage your email from your desktop application such as Outlook or Outlook express).

So, I’ve just set my Gmail account to allow POP access, entered the details into Outlook and am now happily checking my email via my desktop.

And the best bit? Gmail filters the incoming email for spam, then lets me download it… at which point Cloudmark filters the incoming email. Bingo. Double spam filtration… and a lot less work for me clicking the delete button.

I just thought I’d update you on my Cloudmark anti-spam statistics…

Time saved to date (hrs)         22
Money saved to date           $440
Emails processed to date  15,215
Spam caught to date          8,091
Spam I’ve blocked to date      290

So I’ve “helped” the Cloudmark system by notifying it of 290 spams. On the other hand, it’s blocked 8,091 spams saving me 22 hours of time since May 10th… the last 10 weeks. Not bad! As for saving $440, well, it should be more like $11,000 if you ask me. At $40/year or $4/month, I think this is a phenomenal purchase.  

If you want to try it, click this link to get your free 15-day trial download. If it works for you, please use this referral code… eaa76 … when you purchase and I’ll get a free month. Thanks. 

BTW, That means I’m getting about 200 emails per day, of which about 105 are spam. I’m guessing about 90% of the rest are automated sale receipts, support ticket notices, affiliate commission notices, mail delivery notices, vacation notices and non-spam promotions from marketers… so I get about 10 genuine personal emails per day… roughly.

Mental note: Decrease incoming email volume for an easier life.