Anti-Spam Services

Nova.Org operates a two-tier anti-spam and anti-virus mail defense.

At the first tier, at the edge of the network, we have a Symantec Mail Security 8160 appliance. This box attempts to estimate the “spamminess” of individual IP addresses (the likelihood that mail from that IP is spam). For IPs that are a little bit spammy, we allow the mail to come in, but slowly. IPs that are surely spammy are given little or no service at all. Finally, IPs that are unknown or believed to be clean get good, normal service.

The goal here is to prevent spam from taking up a lot of our bandwidth. Plus, if we can determine that the email is probably spam because we know it’s coming from a known spamming IP, we’ll be really slow about serving them. Spammers don’t want to waste time. They want to get their message out and move along. So, if we’re really slow, they’ll chalk it up to poor network performance and go try their spam on someone else’s mail server.

In August 2007, we saw on average 2.4 connections made per second. Out of those, 2% were known to be clean, 15% were known to be spam, 24% were new, and the rest were divided across a reputation spectrum of 10-90% spam.

Nova.Org operates two Symantec Mail Security 8300 systems to do content-level filtering. We have up-to-the-minute virus definitions and up-to-the-minute spam information. It’s very unlikely that you will get much spam if we filter your mail for you.

In an average week, (e.g., August 19-26, 2007) we processed 605,021 messages, of which 590,044 (98%) were classified as spam. Staggering, huh? In that week only 14,000 messages were legit. In that same week there were 7 viruses and 117 suspected spam.

Do we get false positives? Sometimes. If you don’t want us to discard mail to your domain, you can have us mark it up and you can do the filtering yourself. Out of all the domains we handle mail for (200 or so) and all the individual customers we handle (600+), we really get very few complaints. Everyone is set to discard spam, and nobody seems to mind. In fact, when we first brought these systems online a year ago, some people thought the mail server was broken—they weren’t getting any spam!

If you are one of our Colocation customers, the anti-spam service is included in your colocation package. Just tell us the domains to protect and what mail server receives the clean mail.

If you have your domain hosted somewhere else, you can still get our anti-spam service for $50/year per customer. That’s right. We don’t charge per domain. We charge per YOU. Whether you run your own personal domain for just you, or you run a small family server with a dozen of your friends and family on it, we just charge you once. If you’ve got a bunch of domains (many of us geeks have 2 dozen each), it’s still just the one charge1).