Spam Filtering

Ivenue's email system uses SpamAssassin (offsite link) to filter out a majority of the spam (unwanted, unsolicited commercial email) that is forwarded to your email accounts.

SpamAssassin is one of the most trusted and well-known mail filtering programs on the market, with over 900 different tests to analyze each email and determine whether or not it is spam. Each one of these tests looks for specific characteristics associated with spam, like forged return email or IP addresses, and subject lines that don't match the content of the email or contain words that are known to be linked with spam. Once the email has been subjected to all of these tests, SpamAssassin checks the sender's IP address with a database of known spam sources and ISPs that support spam. If the email violates too many of these rules or tests, it is classified as spam and returned to the sender.

On the SpamAssassin site, you can check the rules and the scoring applied to each rule when it matches. The rules themselves are cryptic (written in a format called regular expressions), but you can view the actual rules if you download and extract the source code. We also maintain a custom local rule file we write for the most egregious offenders.

There are no spam filtering programs that can catch all of these unsolicited emails, but SpamAssassin does a good job of minimizing the amount of spam that makes it through to your Inbox.

More detail on components of Ivenue's spam filtering: