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Customer Support
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Why am I getting spam?
Spammers did not get your email address from Modwest, Inc.: we never sell or give away your information. Spammers scour the web harvesting email addresses. If you have posted on a newsgroup, bulletin board, or signed a web-based guestbook, spammers may have found your address that way. They also scour domain name registration (WHOIS) records, harvesting the email addresses of administrative, technical and billing contacts for domains; they often guess at possible addresses as well.Once they have your email address, they put it along with thousands of others in the BCC (blind carbon copy) field of a mail, effectively hiding your and thousands of other email addresses. They also usually use a fake "To" and "From" address, a practice called "spoofing." If the fake address they use for that purpose happens to belong to someone, it usually results in a denial of service attack against the innocent person, as tons of complaints and bounced mails begin flood that person's inbox.
Spammers also lookup the "MX" (mail exchange) record of your domain name (which must be publicly available in order for the internet to work) and use it to determine that "mail.modwest.com" is your domain's mail server. They then put your harvested email address in the "Bcc" recipient list of a SPAM and falsely enter "admin@mail.modwest.com" or something similar in the "from" or "to" field. That falsely misleads people into thinking that Modwest is involved in the spam or has sold your information. We assure you, we haven't.
Spammers are hard to stop. If you stop them via one method, they adapt quickly: if you filter emails for keywords, they change their messages to work around such filters. Plus, if you too aggressively filter your mail for spam, you may inadvertantly filter out legitimate mail. This problem not only affects you, but us and everyone else using the internet.
What Can You Do to Stop Spam?
1. Avoid posting your real email address on websites, newsgroups, etc. If you do post publicly and want people to be able to contact you by email, you can post your email as myselfABC@domain.com and then include a note in your post to "take out the ABC to email me."
2. Be careful who you give your email address to and what you signup for with your email address. Giving your email address to the wrong website or company could result in it being sold in bulk to spammers.
3. Adjust your Spam Settings under "Email" in OnSite and do the following:
- Select "Custom" from the first drop-down menu.
- In the Threshold box, type: 3.0
- Under "Spam Handling" choose "Delete it."
Finally, click the 'Save' button at the bottom of the page. Just remember that many HTML newsletters and other HTML email might be deleted silently with these aggressive filter settings. If this bothers you, you may want to start with a less aggressive threshold number in Step One, such as 5 or 8. You can also use it to add email addresses to your personal whitelist or blacklist.
4. You can report spam to SpamCop. This service can tell you where the email originated and notify that email service's administrators that they are being used to relay spam.
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