Tony Dye made a point in his comment on my last post.
Of approx. 250 users on our site, something like 80% of all spam is targeted at just 12-15 email addresses. I’m starting to teach special anti-spam techniques to this selective group.
I have about the same ratio, I have 3 users that are hammered with spam out of about 35 and I have begun doing some education with them, however, I am going to blanket everyone with information on steps to do to avoid spam so we can all be more pro-active. Ideally, as we grow, we can learn from those that have been there and done that.
As I mentioned before, my goal is to get things switched over by year end, so assuming nothing changes drastically, it should be do-able. I agree, just like in many other areas, education is key and it is worth taking the time to get the word out and get people on board.
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One more thing, I just saw Jason’s post referencing my last post. If you’re able, definitely pick up POSTINI. I say this based simply on Jason’s original review of it and his continued success with it. Keep in mind, my attempt at holding spam at bay is based on my limited funds and next year is still up in the air, budget-wise and in other ways, as well. For me lately, I’m learning to deal with the moment because I seriously have no idea what tomorrow will bring.
Jim,
We’re using MailFrontier, running on our Exchange server. It is very effective in blocking spam.
I’ve read a lot of good reviews of Postini as well. The main difference is that MailFrontier is
licensed software whereas Postini is a subscription service.
Clif
Crossroads doesn’t use a specific spam blocking technique. We don’t even run our own mail server. I use fastmail.fm for my and my wife’s personal mailbox. It does a great job of blocking spam. Most of our other church accounts are on our DSL/web hosting provider tc3net.com (a local ISP). They also do pretty decent spam blocking (I believe they use SpamAssassin).
For small churches, I’d say find a company that will host your email and provide spam blocking as well. My wife and I both like fastmail.fm quite a bit. It’s only $20/yr per mailbox.
On top of that my wife and I use Mozilla Thunderbird for email. It has a bayesian spam detector built in. It takes a while to train it, but once it is trained it catches most of the spam that fastmail.fm doesn’t get.
I don’t even worry about being careful with my email anymore. Most spam just plain doesn’t get through.