Website Down Due to SPAM Using to Much Memory!

[Stitch Up]

Our website is hosted by Total Server Solutions. I also setup associated email account e.g. [email]support@our_domain.com[/email] [email]sales@our_domain.com[/email] etc etc.

I use MS Outlook as my email client together with Mailwasher Pro to filter out all the crap - between 400 & 600 a day and these are the one's that get passed the hosting service spam filters!!!

The situation has become so bad that our website is frequently failing - twice this week and I really need to find a permanent solution.

I've considered various options but would appreciate some input from you guys just to see if you have any new ideas I've not thought of.

Thanks

John

[daviddeer]

Firstly I would set up spam assassin to delete all emails with a score of 5 or more to be deleted at server level.
It would be better to use email addressees other than support and sales as harvesters target these addressees first maybe use support1#@ or salez25@.
Deleting and intercepting emails at pre server or server level will reduce the load on your server. When you download them to your computer using outlook it increases your bandwidth usage (it may also highlight you as a spam sender yourself!) and so slows down your server access. So using web-based email such as roundcube from your cpanel will allow you to view emails and delete them before download. You can also mark emails as spam, with spam assassin enabled it can learn to be more selective about which emails are marked as spam.
Alternatively you can use a cloud based email intercept solution such as spam-titan which filters emails before they reach your server. However it costs around $17 a month.
I sometimes delete the email accounts which receive a lot of spam for a week or so so that the messages are bounced back, then set it up again later.
I hope the following will be of help:
How to setup Spam Asasassin to automatically delete emails If you want to automatically delete all mail that you receive with a spam score of 5 or more just follow these steps;

1. Access/Log On to your cPanel
2. Click Email -> Spam Assassin
3. Click Enable Spam Assasin
4. Click Email -> Spam Assassin
5. Click Configure (required to rewrite subjects)
6. For the rewrite_header subject enter ***SPAM***
7. Click Email -> Spam Filters
8. In the dropdown box Block mails when choose theSubject and also Contains.
9. In the new box, enter ***SPAM***
10. In the Destination box type Discard. (this means to delete)

So now, any mail with a score of 5 or more will automatically get a subject rewrite of ***SPAM***
The filter will now delete any mail with the word ***SPAM*** in the subject line.
You can also choose to use a filter on your Outlook or other mail program and bypass steps 7-10 and do the filtering on your home computer, but why waste the download time of downloading Spam. Just delete it on the server level!

What is Webmail? How do I access it? -Delete
What is Webmail? How can I read my mail online?
Webmail is similar to Hotmail or Yahoo where it allows you to read your mail online via a web browser. Every account with Total Server Solutions has access to webmail for pop3 accounts. To access your webmail account please visit your domain and put a /webmail at the end of your URL (example; http://www.yourdomain.com/webmail/). You will now be prompted for a username and password. Type your email address as your username, and then your email address password. You can now view your mail online without downloading it to your computer first.
Many users will set up a spam filter on their mail box, but forget to empty the spam from the box. Also, if the user has put mail in the trash, be sure that the trash can is emptied (just like in windows, even though you delete a file, it sits in the trash until emptied).

Generic Forwarders and Spam Setting a forwarder for a default email account or even just individual forwarders can be a tricky thing when it comes to spammers and how other ISPs view your email.

When mail is sent to your account and you have a forwarder setup to send the mail to another ISP address the mail actually leaves our server as if it was being sent from our machine. The problem with this is if you receive SPAM on your email address, and our server forwards the message to your other email address, it actually appears that YOU are the one spamming, rather than the original sender.

It is strongly advised that generic email addresses such as Sales, Support, webmaster, orders, service and things of that nature are NOT forwarded to 3rd party locations. Such addresses are often targets for spam, and the forwarding may result in legitimate emails being blocked by your ISP.

[Stitch Up]

Thanks David for the detailed reply.

I'm presently looking at my options and possibly moving my email accounts away from my hosting service completely. Most of my emails are deleted from the server and not downloaded to outlook. I'd reckon between 4 and 6 hundred emails are deleted in this way. I have configured Spam Assassin to delete junk so they'll be in addition!!!

Hopefully I'm going to make a decision this weekend on how to combat this crap

Cheers

John

[logobear]

why not use a gmail ?
you can set it up using absolutely any email, and it all goes through gmail.
I might not know what I am talking about compared with daviddeers answer, but we have never had any problems with a standard [email]info@***.co.uk[/email]

[willd]

why not use a gmail ?
you can set it up using absolutely any email, and it all goes through gmail.
I might not know what I am talking about compared with daviddeers answer, but we have never had any problems with a standard [EMAIL="info@***.co.uk]info@***.co.uk[/EMAIL]

We route our [EMAIL="enquiries@####.com]enquiries@####.com[/EMAIL] email through gmail too - I looked yesterday and we receive around 50 spam emails per month, and they all go into the gmail spam folder automatically. Can't say that it's all gmail's work though, as I think our host - 1and1 - stop a lot of it...

[James990]

Yuck, 1 and 1, the worst perople I have ever had the misfortune to have anything to do with. They cancelled my account with no warning at all and left 30 odd doamins without any home, and cost me a fortune!

[daviddeer]

The gmail solution would work fine in the short term but it doesn't solve the long term server bandwidth problem. I assume your hosting is unlimited. One final solution to use a challenge based system such as spamarrest which allows you to allow or deny mail and asks the sender to confirm their actions after delivery. It costs around $65 a year and can have multiple email addresses. The spam drops significantly after 3 months. You can configure your email client to use spamarrest.
I would suggest this if all else fails.

[willd]

Yuck, 1 and 1, the worst perople I have ever had the misfortune to have anything to do with. They cancelled my account with no warning at all and left 30 odd doamins without any home, and cost me a fortune!

My biggest gripe with them is that it costs me an arm and a leg for my hosting - it's a legacy package which I would very much like to reduce the cost of, but to retain the varied bits and pieces that I use there doesn't seem to be a cheaper alternative - I host a few other websites so I can't do anything too rash.

I have looked at other hosts on a couple of occasions, but havng checked some of the excellent reviews found them to be fake. The mainstream hosts are either expensive or lacking in one way or another, trying to find a good smaller host seems to be a frying pan and fire scenario! I've had a couple of recommendations, when I get time I'll have another look...

[Stitch Up]

Thanks all for the replies and ideas.

Firstly, the tech support I receive from Total Server Solutions (TSS) has been amazing. I have no reward for promoting these guys. I'm not a techie on web-hosting so have to rely on them and others.

As I see it, I basically have to take my email accounts away from TSS but I'd like to keep my email addresses. I have heard that Gmail have some of the most effective spam filters so this could be useful. I still believe an awful lot of spam will get through because it's sent from 'compromised' computers. Are there any instructions for setting Gmail to take existing email accounts? Is this going to stop the over use of memory on my existing hosting service?

The quantity of spam aimed at us has basically become a 'denial of service', perhaps that's the reason for it.

Sorry for all the questions!!

[James990]

I host with a great firm, have no problems with going over bandwidth, or spam.