In recent weeks there has been a dramatic increase in spam mail to our servers.
Our initial attempts at blocking these emails were ineffective as they had low spam scores; the usual mechanisms to filter such mail was bypassed. In most cases, the offending words used wildcard characters (*@%#) in place of vowels and therefore weren’t recognised by the filters as offensive words.
In addition, the mail appeared to come from legitimate senders, as they were sent from trusted domains that had been hijacked to send spam. What has made this latest episode intolerable is that it has mostly been of an offensive, explicit nature.
On Sunday 23 October our systems engineers implemented effective spam filtering updates, which have significantly reduced the amount of spam reaching inboxes. These mails are still coming in, but are now diverted to the spambucket of each mail account.
Following the update our servers received 112 million emails during the last week of October, of which 45 million were blocked outright due to known blocklists. An additional 340,000 emails were blocked by the new measures we’ve put in place.
While these latest spam filtering updates have stemmed the tide, we are actively working on implementing further anti-spam measures.
Note that due to the increase in strength of the spam filtering to combat the spam, there is a slightly higher chance that legitimate email may end up in the spambucket. It is recommended that you keep an eye on your spambucket for these “false-positives” and whitelist relevant mail from known senders.
For further information on spam filtering, refer to our Help Centre.
