Actinic Hosting & Spam Emails

[ComicDomain]

We use Actinic Hosting but since set-up (about 4 weeks now) we get seriously spammed twice a week, with anything from 300-500 emails, all from different email domains, but pretty much saying 'mail undelivered' 'mailer demon' 'postmaster' etc etc.

Looking at the Actinic Hosting Control Panel for blacklisting and spam deletion, we've increased the 'score' everyweek, but still get heavily spammed.

Has anybody else been affected in this way?
Did you find a solution to the problem?

The other thing we've noticed is a huge increase in spam that has the senders name the same as our own email address - How is this possible? As I'm assuming we can't/shouldn't black list our own email address, but is there any way to stop/block it?

[Jan]

Spam sent to us has increased drastically over the last couple of months - similar sorts of things to you, I got the same sorts of spam on accounts hosted by three different hosts so I don't believe it's an Actinic hosting issue.

I'm now using spamarrest to filter emails and it's working well, it's one of those things where it sends an email back with a captcha to new email addresses. I installed it and 95% of the spam stopped (the other 5 got through because I imported the 13000 email addresses I had in outlook to my whitelist). It cost me 50$ for a year and it has been well worth the money.

Regards,

[pinbrook]

Looking at the Actinic Hosting Control Panel for blacklisting and spam deletion, we've increased the 'score' everyweek, but still get heavily spammed.

there are alot of spams around at the mo that are defying the scoring systems set up by spam filters. Typically you would set your score at 4 and it would be fairly aggresive,but on inspecting the spam that gets past my filter i notice it has a score of 0.2 for example. As Jan says nowadaysyou needto have 2 levels of defence. The first is your host's filter, but by nature any host mainly catering for business use will have a slightly more permissive filter than google/yahoo etc as they have to ensure business emails don't get blocked. The 2nd filter needs to be on your PC where you canset and manipulate your own levels. Personally i use mailwasher.

The other thing we've noticed is a huge increase in spam that has the senders name the same as our own email address - How is this possible? As I'm assuming we can't/shouldn't black list our own email address, but is there any way to stop/block it?

you should also look to publishing an SPF record to help with this, this should be available to you on your hosting control panel

[ComicDomain]

Thanks all for the advice,

Just to let you know we looked into the ones you suggested and also tried them all - it helped a great deal!

A few still get through and we've had one batch of about 100 dodgy emails sneak through, but so far we're slowly eliminating them.