Viruses, Spam Filtering & Spyware Removal

In order to better serve our clients, we have implemented both virus scanning and unsolicited email filtering. (Unsolicited email is commonly known as spam.)

Below we have more information about Virus Scanning and Spam Filtering and Spyware Removal.

Virus Scanning
First, we strongly suggest you use some sort of commercial virus protection. It is very important! Secondly, DON'T OPEN attachments from people you do not know and aren't expecting.

For our clients, virus scanning takes place before any mail is delivered to or from our servers so this not only helps protect you, but also people in your contact lists. We do this as a service to our clients, but do not offer any guarantee for this service. Users maintain all liability for any damage a virus may cause to their systems.

We also recommend setting your mail client to not display images in HTML emails by default. You can always click to show them if the message is something you are interested in. We recommend this for two reasons. First, viruses and trojan horses can be embedded in images. Second, spammers will embed an image to track when you open their spam message.

Spam Filtering
Spam blocking is accomplished in two different ways. We would be able to block more unwanted email, but the tighter we structure the system, the higher the probability we would block real email as well. Therefore we only take advantage of these two methods outlined below.

1. DNS Blacklists
2. Mail header checking
3. Spam Assassin

We also reccomend using a mail client that includes adaptive junk mail filtering such as Mozilla Thunderbird.

DNS Blacklists
DNS Blacklists are Internet services that keep lists of addresses for known spammers. Our mail servers contact one or more of those services before allowing email to pass through to you.

Mail Header Checking
Mail header checking consists of a set of rules that, if a mail header matches, triggers the mail server to return that email.

Spam Assassin
Spam Assassin is a service that works in conjunction with our mail server to determine what messages are likely spam and which are not.  It assignes levels of "spamminess" to messages and inserts the results into the header of the email.  For example, X-Spam-Level: *** indicates that the message has a spamminess of 3.  Normally we accept that messages with spamminess of over 6 are normally all spam.  We have had good results using level 3 with our mail clients.

Here is how to setup Microsoft Outlook 2000/xp to filter spam with spamassassin.

1. Right click on your Inbox and choose New folder
2. Name the folder Spam then click OK.
3. Click on the Tools menu and slide down to Rules Wizard.
4. Click New on the Rules Wizard window.
5. Choose Check Messages when they arrive and click Next.
6. Check the box for With <Specific Words> in the Message header.
7. Click the Specific words link.  Type in:   X-Spam-Level: ***
8. Click Move it to the specified folder.
9. Select the Spam folder then click OK.
10. Click Finish then OK.

Spyware Removal
We recommend regularly using a product such as AdAware Plus by Lavasoft to remove spyware from your computer. They have a version that is free for personal use as well as a version you can purchase.

If you have questions or comments, send mail to admin@spinnakerweb.com.