One of my Domains is my family name which is used by my family members. Two family members use forwarders to accounts hosted elsewhere. The issue that has come up is that the hosting service monitors outgoing mail to detect spammers (which would generally be a good thing) but forwarded mail being both incoming and outgoing simultaneously sees incoming spam as outgoing spam! So I had to disable the forwarders.
The recent death of John C. Dvorak reminded me that he claimed over the years “I Get No SPAM”. He used a service that filtered all incoming mail. One’s domain’s MX record was set to the service, then the service filters the mail and sends it to the mail server the MX record originally pointed to.
By doing this, theoretically no spam ever hits one’s email server which means that no spam would be forwarded out.
I found two possible services. The one Dvorak used, https://www.junkemailfilter.com, and another I found that works similarly spamhero.com. Both of these filter the whole domain and the volume of mail the domain gets would fit under either’s $5/month plans.
I do have some minor security concerns since any service will examine the contents of all mail, but I’ve always considered email to have the security of postcards anyway.
So does anyone here use or know anything about these or other similar services? Note that client-based filter programs like SpamSieve are not useful in my case.
Neither do I, in my Inbox. Google’s filters catch the 5 or 10 “ish” messages per month that hit my Gmail account, but that doesn’t help you. Question, do you have anything that could run Thunderbird mail full time?
Many years ago I used Tbird to poll a voice mail system that also received faxes. Then deliver the faxes to a seldom on-site executive.
My Rube Goldberg idea for today is to use TB, logged into your family domain, and the accounts of your two family menbers. Then set up rules to move their messages to a folder in their “elsewhere” account, rather than forward them.
My son who had one of the forwarding accounts has an IT related job and has been looking into doing just this (moving the messages between the accounts). The advantage of the filtering service is that it is very straightforward, works automatically for all accounts, and doesn’t require duplicating efforts especially for those not technically inclined.
I also have a Gmail account which seems to get about as much spam as my domain account. I’ve had to manually add rules to catch some particularly obnoxious Gmail Spam. Their builtin filtering doesn’t capture all.
There is a 30 day free trial (no credit card needed) so I may just try it out and see what happens.
Each row represents a recipient address. There are five users, but I take up a few addresses for myself. The one labeled “vendors” is what I have used when I need an address for purchases where my address might be sold to spammers. You can see that it often is. The one labeled “exposed” is on my website where it is easily scraped. 100% spam there. The ones labeled “invalid” haven’t been used in over a decade but spam continues to come in to them. 30% of the incoming mail gets marked as spam and quarantined.
Spamhero has the ability to do forwards, so the email I used to forward from my host I can now forward through Spamhero, cleaning up things for my host and eliminating some spam as well. Additionally we found that my host was sometimes discarding forwarded mail (as spam, I guess), so my son is now getting messages that were formerly “lost”.
So far it has been a great decision. I don’t know how many people here this sort of service would be useful to, but I highly recommend this for all to whom it applies.
