We received emails from a couple customers stating their spam counts seem to be increasing, so we have deployed some additional spam fighting measures, including: (1) more RBL lists, for example to block emails from dynamic IP addresses, which are a leading source of spam. (2) new rulesets, which raise the Spam Assassin score for emails that contain common characteristics of spam emails. (3) lowered deletion thresholds, which result in more obvious spam being deleted and not passed through to your email client.

Of course we continue to leverage a lot of other measures, including rejecting virus-laden emails before they even enter the mail servers, the Spamhaus SBL and XBL RBLs, Bayesian spam filtering, the DCC, Razor and Pyzor checks, the SURBL and a lot more.

We encourage customers to use filters/rules in your email clients to filter SA-marked spam emails into a spam folder and to use a Bayesian filter locally, such as the ones built into the Thunderbird or Mail.app email clients. You may also want us to setup SPF records for your domains. Try not to use catchall email accounts if you can avoid it. Catchalls inevitably increase the amount of spam you get.

If you're using Mailman, you should be aware of several moderately critical vulnerabilities that have been discovered: mailman - Multiple Vulnerabilities. Please note that the only newer version of Mailman available is a release candidate so I don't recommend upgrading yet. Once Mailman 2.1.9 is out, please feel free to file a ticket and we'll upgrade any existing Mailman instances for you.

Update: Mailman 2.1.9 is now out. If you're using a previous version, please file a ticket to have us upgrade your Mailman install.

Do you need your email filtered into different directories on the mail server based on your specific needs? Then you're in luck because now you can get your filters put into place just by filing a support ticket. Don't worry about syntax, just send us your pseudo-code (if, then, etc) and we will translate it into the filter rules you need using maildrop, a server-side mail filtering and delivery agent (similar to procmail) from the Courier MTA project.