ArgoSoft Pro Spam Control

Argosoft has a few features to help you weed out spam messages. These features are basic and do not take the place of full-features spam filtering software, but with careful tuning you can seriously cut down on the amount of spam you receive.

Use ORBD – It's a good idea to check all incoming email against the ORBD database, as this can eliminate a huge amount of spam. ORBD stands for Open Relay Database; it is a list of a huge number of SMTP servers which allow anyone to send to anyone. These servers are used by spammers to help hide their activities.

It's easy to set ArgoSoft to use this database. Simply choose Tools->Security->ORBD. As you can see from the screen below, all you need to do after that is enable ORBD.

It is very important to understand what this means. Sites are added to ORBD as they are determined to be open relays (which means they are prime candidates for spam), and deleted as they are fixed. Any sites that are listed in the database will NOT be able to send email to any account on your email server if this open is chosen.

MAPS database - MAPS is similar in concept to ORBD, except for two things: it requires a subscription (free for most users, but registration is still needed) and it casts a wider net. While ORBD tends to block specific TCP/IP addresses, MAPS blocks ranges of addresses. This means if you use MAPS you may block more email messages which are not spam. Because of this, I personally decided against using the MAPS database.

Set up trusted TCP/IP addresses – There are some TCP/IP addresses that you just trust. This could be the range of addresses on your intranet, the computers of your children or another email server. Set these addresses here (specifically or a range). Remember, however, that the email filters are still used.

Set up TCP/IP addresses to be denied access – This is one of the most effective anti-spam settings that you can use. What I do is scan my log files occasionally, looking for patterns of spam. When I see an entry that looks like spam, I add the TCP/IP address to this screen.

Any messages sent from these TCP/IP addresses are automatically rejected. 

Filters – With ArgoSoft you have the option of creating lists of filter text which is compared against messages to determine if they are spam. You have two sets of filters: a general filter which applies to all messages received by the server, and a specific filter which can be set separately on each account.

The advantage of these filters is messages will be rejected immediately by the email server with a 550 error. This is a "bounce" and will cause many mailing lists to remove the account from their list. The message will never be received on the server. I've found, however, that this causes issues with mailing lists such as egroups, in that a single bounce can cause the list to be suspended. It can be pretty annoying to find that I haven't received any emails from newsletters because messages have been bounced and the list removed me automatically.

When setting up filters, remember that the entire message (or just the header, depending upon your setting) is scanned for each filter you specify. Thus, if you specify something short, say MLM, you might find more mail than you would expect bounced. Why? Attachments are stored within an email message and are scanned, as are all of the email header fields. This means your short text could match some random characters anywhere in the message. You need to be sure your filters are long enough to not match random text throughout messages.

Define general filters – I found it's best to set some very specific filters in the general filter tab, keeping in mind that if any of these lines of text are found in a message than that message will be rejected. This applies to ALL accounts and domains on the server. So, briefly, the object is to define text which, if contained in a message, will always cause the message to bounce. 

Be careful, though, as this will bounce newsletters and email list messages, whether or not they are desired. For example, if you included a filter of "adult website" because you didn't want any adult messages, you might cause a newsletter to bounce just because it had an article on adult websites.

Define specific filters on a per account basis – Now you can define filters on a specific account by account basis. Why would you want to do this? Let's say you had an email account just for newsletters and another for general email. You might want to filter the general email account aggressively, yet still receive all of the newsletters. In this case, you would only define a few very specific filters in the general filters, none in the newsletter account and some aggressive filters in the account filter.