Overkill? Cs Loxinfo's Spam Blocker

[Art]

CS LoxInfo has a new "Spam Blocker" advertised on the first page of their web home page (on a rotating basis with other ads). The ad points to a page which is available only in Thai.

My experience with this new service has been poor. It filters out messages from some of my friends. These messages have no words in them which would be a pattern typical of a spam message.

I wanted to set a "lower" level of spam protection (such as you can do with Yahoo and Hotmail) to catch fewer non-spam messages. I checked the web page referenced by CS LoxInfo that lists caught "spam" messages. (This page indicates that LoxInfo is using Symantec Brightmail AntiSpam on their servers.) No place there to lower the level. Then I went into the web mail. No place there either to lower the level.

I called LoxInfo tech support and had a 15-minute conversation with the rep. He did not seem very knowledgeable about their Spam Blocker and had to keep putting me on hold. He ended up saying neither he nor I could change the protection level. I found this very hard to believe. I told him in that case, I wanted to turn off LoxInfo's SpamBlocker (and buy my own local antispam program). He said he could turn off LoxInfo's Spam Blocker for me.

Does anyone know whether LoxInfo really won't let me change the level of protection to reduce the number of good emails captured by LoxInfo's Spam Blocker?

Thanks.

[Abandon]

couldn't let the thread slip away without at least one reply. Interesting topic and good info. I guess most appreciate the info but have nothing to add. Not too many people using loxinfo yet as they only just reduced their prices.

At least you can turn the spam blocker off - unlike those poor people (like me) who are blocked from many world wide servers by the nasty SpamCop. We have no recourse to have our emails listed as non-spam. Nor can the receivers opt out of the service.

[Ajarn]

I don't know what the criteria Lox uses in its Spam program, but I have no complaints. I used to get hundreds of Spam per day (mostly from my website addy), but now maybe 1 slips through per week. I checked daily for mistakes for the first couple of weeks, but never saw a mistake, so now I leave it alone.

[Art]

I don't know what the criteria Lox uses in its Spam program, but I have no complaints. I used to get hundreds of Spam per day (mostly from my website addy), but now maybe 1 slips through per week. I checked daily for mistakes for the first couple of weeks, but never saw a mistake, so now I leave it alone.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I have done further research on this topic by downloading the Administration Guide for Symantec Brightmail AntiSpam, the application used on LoxInfo's mail servers:

http://www.symantec.com/techsupp/enterpris...0x/manuals.html

My conclusions:

(1) LoxInfo has improperly optioned the Brightmail application currently resulting in too many "false positves" for spam. Thus, too many of your valid emails end up being filtered out by LoxInfo.

(2) A policy of never checking what LoxInfo thinks is spam is dangerous if you don't want to lose any valid email. I am monitoring what LoxInfo thinks is spam for two people's LoxInfo accounts and CURRENTLY, this is way off. I emphasize the word, "currently" because the above poster assumed that LoxInfo's spam critiria remains constant. That's incorrect as they can change the "scoring" at any time and it seems that their current setting is bad.

(3) If people check what LoxInfo thinks is spam and find that a lot of good email is considered spam by LoxInfo, I suggest they write LoxInfo as per these words that appear at the bottom of the LoxInfo "Quarantine Summary":

"If you have any comment and suggession, please kindly send e-mail to [email protected] or contact Customer Service at 0-2263-8222 (24 Hrs.)"

If enough people contact them, hopefully they'll realize they have a problem. The techical support person I spoke to didn't understand much of what I said. Part of the problem was the language problem. The other part was that the technical support person knew almost nothing about LoxInfor's spam filter!

[Gazza]

I don't know what the criteria Lox uses in its Spam program, but I have no complaints. I used to get hundreds of Spam per day (mostly from my website addy), but now maybe 1 slips through per week. I checked daily for mistakes for the first couple of weeks, but never saw a mistake, so now I leave it alone.

Very much the same as Ajarn. Except that I do a quick check of the spam listings.

I only receive about about 10 personal emails per week anyway, but none so far has wrongly been mistaken for spam.

[Ajarn]

I don't know what the criteria Lox uses in its Spam program, but I have no complaints. I used to get hundreds of Spam per day (mostly from my website addy), but now maybe 1 slips through per week. I checked daily for mistakes for the first couple of weeks, but never saw a mistake, so now I leave it alone.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Very much the same as Ajarn. Except that I do a quick check of the spam listings.

I only receive about about 10 personal emails per week anyway, but none so far has wrongly been mistaken for spam.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I have always had the daily notices from this spam filter go into a seperate file, just in case... I just went back 2 weeks and looked closely.... Nada.

I only get a couple of dozen emails a week, so mistakes might not be so readily apparant... Still, it makes sense to notify Lox of any ######ups, and maybe they'll even do something about it. TiT.

I applaud Lox for their very aggressive move in this direction. It was literally taking up 2 hours of my day just to run the programs to manage the hundreds of daily Spam I was getting (and who the ###### told them my dick was small, and I couldn't get it up?!) Seriously, so much stress has gone away since it started...

I've always felt forced to be very proactive about Spam and such because it does cause serious problems with my servers and, still, some bot is sending viruses around the world with my email address, the one they mined from the internet, as sender... Before it happened to me, I used to think it was the real sender sometimes, and I even sent back nasty letters and reported some to their server providers.. I feel bad about that now, but it was such a huge annoyance in my life at a time when dimishing annoyances in my life was my first priority, by hook, or by crook...

I still get annoyed by some idiots on the net.... myself included, once or twice, cuz that's the way life is sometimes

It's a constant struggle to fend off the various hackers and spammers, and the technology gives them the tricks and counter tricks, too. My website is designed by me to be extremely interactive with my visitors. But any avenues of communication I offer up like, forums, guest books, mailing lists, live contact, etc., are constantly getting an attack attempt of one kind or another... Just a couple of weeks ago, I got a message from my host company that my server requests were too high, and they threatened to close my site if the problem continued, without further notice. That really freaked me out, and I spent 4 days trying to narrow down (these guys are tricky!), identify, and effectively deal with the problem spammer. And it's always only a temporary reprieve. This one had effectively hacked my logs, which I'd left open to anyone seeing my website stats. As a teacher, I want my whole website to be a good learning tool for anyone interested. I felt I was giving these stats as a learning tool for my visitors, most of them students... Now I've had to password protect that directory, and another, I think, useful information source gets restricted because of one problem, one time. It's just too dam easy to ###### things up for others... And it's too dangerous not to actively respond..

For me, right at this moment, I'm good with Spam. No worries. But the battles aren't over, I know.

Art, thanks for your efforts.

[astral]

I am pretty convinced that CSLoxinfo is on the list of sites to be blocked.

Several e-mails to friends,sent from cslox, have simply not been delivered.

I am looking for the site that lists the baddies of spam.

I knwo it was mentioned here in the last 2-3 weeks

[Art]

I am pretty convinced that CSLoxinfo is on the list of sites to be blocked.

Several e-mails to friends,sent from cslox, have simply not been delivered.

I am looking for the site that lists the baddies of spam.

I knwo it was mentioned here in the last 2-3 weeks

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

It's interesting that you are mentioning the reverse of the problem I found. In my case, the senders thought their email was not being delivered to LoxInfo but upon investigation, we found that it was incorrectly delivered into LoxInfo's "Spam Quarantine". Too bad when this happens because LoxInfo has reduced the Symantec Brightmail default for days saved to 5 days. If the user doesn't retrieve the message from LoxInfo's Spam Quarantine in 5 days, LoxInfo deletes it. Not too good for people who travel often but it does save LoxInfo some money in storage costs!