email-spam

How do you make sure email you send programmatically is not automatically marked as spam?

This is a tricky one - and I've always relied on techniques such as permission-based emails (i.e. only sending to people you have permission to send to) and not using blatantly spamish terminology. Of late, some of the emails I send out programmatically have started being shuffled into people's spam folder automatically - and I'm wonder...

Bayesian filtering for spam

I was wondering if there is any good and clean oo implementation of bayesian filtering for spam and text classification? For learning purposes....

What was your biggest mistake involving programmatically sending email?

I was wondering what some of the biggest programming mistakes people have made involving mass mailing, spamming, testing or email coding in general were. (I've posted mine below...) ...

Email Delivery Question

This question comes on the heels of the question asked here. The email that comes from our web server comes from an IP address that is different than that for the Exchange server. Is this okay if the SPF and Domain keys are setup properly? ...

Resending invitation/action emails

I've got a web app that sends out emails in response to a user-initaited action. These emails prompt the recipient for a response (an URL is included related to the specific action.) I've got some users asking for a "resend" feature to push that email again. My objection is that if the original email ended up in a spam folder (or didn...

Must an SMTP client provide the MTA a globally resolvable hostname in the HELO?

In short: I'm trying to figure out if I should tell a mail administrator of a friend's employer whether their mail configuration should be fixed, or if I should revise my own policy to be more liberal in what I accept, or neither. A friend was complaining of being unable to reach anything on my mailserver. I dug into it and it seems th...

Dynamic IP-based blacklisting

Folks, we all know that IP blacklisting doesn't work - spammers can come in through a proxy, plus, legitimate users might get affected... That said, blacklisting seems to me to be an efficient mechanism to stop a persistent attacker, given that the actual list of IP's is determined dynamically, based on application's feedback and user be...

Guidelines for email newsletter service

I'm implementing a email newsletter sender service using .NET and Windows Server technologies. Are there comprehensive guidelines which could help avoiding emails being trapped by spam filters and other mechanisms? They should cover all aspects of (legal) bulk mail sending: SMTP configuration, DNS, HTML content, images, links within con...

Adding headers to mail coming via exim4

I've got a Debian Etch system running Exim4-daemon-heavy. The system is open to the internet, but the intention is that it will only receive legitimate mail coming from a spam-filtering service, which runs as a proxy ahead of it. (I can't just limit access to those IPs though, because I do have some authorized users who relay via my se...

How to write spam filter

Hi I'm stuck in having to write a simple spam filter I'm not really sure about how I'm going to do it. So far I've come up with wordlist and domain filtering, which will give or remove points up to a certain threshold. For example, if you're writing about "v1agr4" from a blacklisted domain, you'll get like 2 points for spam, but if yo...

Does your email client let you add custom headers programmatically?

I'm working on an anti-spam project (centmail) that involves having the sender use a client plugin that adds a custom header (as well as a signature, but that part's easier). The general problem is to add an email header to your outgoing mail where the contents of the header field is determined dynamically for each message. Surprisingl...

How can I use PHP to obfuscate email addresses so they are not easily harvested by spammers?

I'm programming in PHP and would like to create web pages which have email addresses that are easily read by humans but not easily harvested by spammers. The email addresses are coming from user input, and I think I can identify an address by using a regular expression, but I'm not clear exactly how I should replace the email addresses ...

System.Net.Mail.MailMessage Raw Content / Spam Assassin

Hey everyone, What I am trying to do is pass the raw content of an outgoing email to spamassassin in order to calculate a spam score. I am stuck in how I might get the raw content of the email. My C# code currently just constructs the MailMessage and passes it the SmtpClient's Send() method. Before sending, is there a way to get a raw ...

Blacklists, Whitelists, Spam Folders and Email

I want to get on the whitelists for my email system, any recommendations whom to should contact about doing this, do I contact the big email providers directly (Yahoo, gmail, Microsoft hotmail/msn, AOL)? Also besides domainkeys, dkim and SPF records what else is a good way to protect yourself from getting on blacklists and going into sp...

What's the best way to send emails from a web server to miminise bouces-backs and spam blocks?

I've got a web server that sends email (from IIS 5.1) to clients throughout the world. I have found that sometimes emails get bounced on valid addresses, or they never arrive, or get treated as spam. I'm considering using am external SMTP service. Will this help? Are there other ways/tips? Thanks in advance. ...

How to conduct legitimate email campaigns

We are working on a project that requires us to allow users to register to receive email notifications of certain events. There will potentially be tens or hundreds of thousands of email messages based on any one event. I know that this is done every day all over the web, but what I don't know is how email campaigns are managed such th...

Does HTML Encoding a mailto tag stop spammers

I think its fairly common practice these days not to include a mailto: tag in your webpage. I also realize that a better solution is to have a contact us form. Recently I've seen some mailto tags that include and html encoded email address. Is this an affective way to stop spammers from attacking an email address? example: <a href...

Problem in PHP mail

Dear All I am sending Reply Mail using PHP Those Who sended Mail to me. My Problem is When I send email It sits in SPAM folder .What to do inorder to deliver mail correctly.Any Idea or any change procedure? My Code. <?php $email_id="[email protected]"; $recipient = "@gmail.com"; //recipient $mail_body =...

Setting up Reverse DNS Records

This question is not directly programming related but I need my Server to pass Spam filters for my app to work properly. I talked to my ISP about rDNS and the guy from tech-support told me if I write an email with what they should add to my DNS record they would do that. My question: What should I tell him to add if my hostname is "http...

What's the most straightforward way to delete emails marked as spam by SpamAssassin?

I'm on Ubuntu Intrepid, using Postfix and SpamAssassin. I've seen approaches using procmail (like the one suggested @ Apache), but I'm looking for a solution that does not use procmail. This is a programming question because the correct answer will be some form of code that accomplishes the task at hand (my response to the negative vote...