Spam has been an ongoing issue for me while owning devoll.net. It has gotten so bad lately that I’ve given up trying to defeat it at my server. I was using d-spam for a while, but something went haywire and I couldn’t get the code to run stably on my linux distro. Then I switched to spam assassin, but trying to keep my def files up to date became a chore.

Then I ran across SpamStopsHere.com. There are many services out there for outsourced spam and virus filtering, but I liked the pitch of SpamStopsHere, and I liked the friendly pricing they had for family domains. $12.50 a month or $125 a year for both spam filtering and virus filtering on up to 10 mailboxes (or 50,000 messages per day). Fits the bill nicely.

Yes, there are “free” solutions out there, but I like the idea of paying for a service that is useful. Once you pay, you can raise your expectation levels that the service will work properly, and continue to be around down the road. With free services, there’s no guarantee of a level of service, nor a guarantee that they’ll be there in 3 months. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure these types of services start off with the best of intentions, but it costs money to provide quality and reliability. I’m OK paying for that.

The way this service works is pretty straightforward. After activating your account, you point the DNS MX records for your domain to their mail servers, and then they forward your scanned and filtered mail on to your mail server. Simple as that.

I “installed” their service around 6:00pm last Sunday, and in the 48 hours since then they have filtered over 60,000 spam messages. You read that right, 60,000. Spam literally has stopped dead on my mailbox. Where I was once getting several hundred per day (on my mailbox alone, not to mention the rest of my family), I now get 0.

That’s the kind of dramatic effect I was hoping for, but honestly, I was anticipating something less. I like being pleasantly surprised.

One of the problems I’ve had to deal with regarding spam is “reply-to storms.” This is where a spammer decides to use your email address as the “reply-to” on the spam they’re sending out to other people. That way, when/if their server rejects the message, it sends it back to you instead of the spammer. I was getting these “storms” about once a week, where literally thousands of email messages would come in in a matter of minutes. In some cases the load was so overwhelming that it acted like a denial of service attack, crashing my machine. Since SpamStopsHere has a distributed inbound SMTP infrastructure, they can easily withstand the storms, and since they’re doing the filtering, I never see the traffic. My server is breathing much more easily now. Whereas I would regularly see 100 Postfix SMTP tasks running on my server, now I see 3 or 4.

Another cool side benefit of the service is store and forward queueing. Should my server ever go down or become unreachable, SpamStopsHere will simply queue my incoming “good” mail, and try to deliver it until my server comes back up.

So far so good. I hope the service continues to live up to what I’ve seen in the first 2 days. Give them a try: www.spamstopshere.com.

So, we’ve been working really hard at Viewzi and have recently launched our newest incarnation of the Viewzi search experience, which we call Viewzi Site Search.

Basically VSS allows site owners to embed a version of Viewzi in their site for local searching of content, presented in Viewzi-goodness. By simply signing up at viewzi.com and downloading a plugin, you can add Viewzi to your WordPress blog (or Habari, more coming soon!) in about 5 minutes.

Go ahead, give it a try. Search for “Disney” in the upper left corner to see it in action.

Pretty cool, huh?