We have decided not to make the wholesale changes as described in the previous post concerning SpamAssassin and your default address. This decision was made because the servers have been responding much better ever since a lot of you changed your default address to discard messages. This has helped immensely and we appreciate everyone’s attention to this.

We are still at about 82% compliance in regards to accounts having their default address set to discard messages. Unfortunately, I don’t have any numbers before we started sending out these notices so I do not know how much of an increase this has been. I know that I don’t need numbers to see the remarkable increase in server performance since this change.

When we first started this project, I was thinking about 90% compliance would be a reasonable goal to shoot for. Obviously 90% was not needed to reach the goal we were looking for in terms of server performance, but I believe the closer we can get to 90% the increase in server performance will be just that much more dramatic.

An idea that I am tossing around right now, is to target those server that are below this 82% compliance and send out notices to those servers. The 82% is coming from the grand total of all of our servers. This means some servers are over this percentage and some are under. If we can get those servers that are under 82% compliance up to around 82% then this will help us to achieve our goal of 90% compliance. Another batch of reminders to those affected servers may be issued later this week.

I should quickly point out that we may be handling the SpamAssassin changes that were detailed previously on a case-by-case basis.  If we notice that SpamAssassin is eating up a significant portion of resources on your account and you have your default address set to deliver mail, we may have to disable SpamAssassin on your account.  This is something that we have to reserve the right to do as we try to keep the servers performing at an optimal level.

All-in-all I am extremely happy with the way this project went. I appreciate everyone’s willingness to make adjustments on their end to help the overall health of the servers.

Scott

As most of you are aware, we have been sending out notices to those clients that have their default address set to deliver mail. Throughout all of this, we have been considering some changes to make in the way the default address setup works. These changes have nothing but the best intentions in mind for all users as a whole. We believe the changes will benefit the server’s performance, which at the same time will benefit you as an end user. These changes are explained further below.

It should be noted that if you have not already adjusted your default address setting and you have no use for your default address, then you should consider making these adjustments. The last blog post provides a good detail of how to go about accomplishing this. There is also a guide available that tells you how to disable your default address.

Please note, we are not removing the function of the default address. We have received a few e-mails with this concern. I know there are is a slight minority out there that wishes to continue using their default address. This is fine, we are not going to take this functionality away from you. You will just have to compromise with us as we try to increase overall server performance, while continuing to support your needs.

The following changes are what we are proposing to make and from the looks of it, it looks like these changes may be adopted early next week, baring any further concerns.

Proposal 1 – Disabling SpamAssassin on accounts that utilize their default address. This is part of a compromise. We believe that your default address is going to receive a lot of spam. If you really think about it, this is not a far-fetched belief. Your default address represents an infinite number of e-mail addresses. Whereas if you create a mail account or a mail forwarder, those addresses only receive e-mail if a sender explicitly sends a message to it. With the default address, a spammer can send out a spam message to literally thousands of bogus e-mail addresses at your domain name and they would all be picked up by your default address. This just makes filtering those messages with SpamAssassin all the more wasteful. Everytime SpamAssassin is invoked, it takes up server resources. If the server is invoking SpamAssassin every time a spam message is sent to a bogus e-mail address on the server, this is taking up server resources that could be used somewhere else on the server. By disabling SpamAssassin on accounts that use their default address, we are still allowing access and functionality to the default address for those clients that want this, but they won’t be able to use SpamAssassin filtering. For those users, it just becomes a case of what is more important to you, server-side spam filtering or a server-side default address?

Proposal 2 – Disallow the default address to forward off of the server. Again, this issue goes back to the default address receiving a high percentage of spam messages. Any time you forward mail off of the server you run the risk of getting the server blacklisted or blocked. When you forward mail off of the server, if the destination server thinks the message is spam, they will see the message as being sent by our server and may block or blacklist our server. When our server becomes blacklisted or blocked, then nobody on the server can send out mail from our server. We have seen instances in the past where a blacklist of our server has been traced back to someone forwarding their default address off of the server. We do have other preventive measures in place that aims to prevent spam messages from being forwarded off of our server, but these measures are not 100% reliable. Couple that with the fact that the default address is likely going to receive a lot of spam and it is easy to see why you should not forward your default address off of the server.

While this proposal will prevent you from using your default address in some manner, it won’t directly stop you from using your default address. If you feel that you must use your default address, then you need to set it to deliver mail locally on the server instead of forwarding it off of the server. This proposed change would only affect those clients that are forwarding their default address off of the server.

Barring any other unforeseen circumstances, we will likely begin rolling out these changes early next week. If you have any comments concerning these changes, you should let us know, so that we can deal with those concerns or push back these changes.

I really do not think these changes will affect the vast majority of our clients. You will just notice better server performance due to increase server resources.

Scott Mutter

Director of Administration

I think there has been some confusion over the recent default address notices we have been sending out. We are trying to send these notices out in a somewhat weekly manner at least for a period of time, so that our clients are aware of this. We will probably be sending out another notice next week and I hope to clarify the problems in that message, but I thought I would go ahead and try to clarify some questions in this post.

When you receive the notice concerning your default address in your e-mail, you will see a section saying something like:

Obviously the domain names listed will be different for each client. Some clients may have more than this listed, others may have less. This is just an example, don’t take it too literally.

I created a flowchart to display this better:

See how there are three accounts listed here, yourdomain.net, subdomain.yourdomain.net, and anotherdomain.com. For each of these domains listed ask yourself the following question:

What e-mail addresses at this domain name do I expect to receive e-mail at?

Its really that simple. Basically you are going to answer this question with one of two answers. The first answer, None, at this point you know it is completely safe to set your default address to discard messages as SMTP time. If this is your response, simply set the default address for that domain to discard messages and repeat this question for the next domain listed.

The other answer is:

I expect to receive e-mail at …, …, …

How many e-mail addresses you list is completely up to you. You may list one. You may list two, you may list 200. It doesn’t matter.

Now for each address that you just listed, ask yourself:

Is this e-mail address set up as a mail account or as a mail forwarder in my control panel?

You will have to log into your control panel and check this for each address. If each e-mail address you have listed is set up either as a mail account or as an e-mail forwarder, then it is safe to set your default address to discard messages at SMTP time.

If some or all of those e-mail addresses you mentioned are not set up as mail account or mail forwarders, then consider setting them up as such. You may need to reconfigure your e-mail program to use a new mail username and password, but the benefit is that you will greatly reduce the amount of spam that you are receiving.

If you have a lot of e-mail addresses that you expect to receive e-mail at and you want all of those messages to collect into a single mail account on your account, just contact support and we will be glad to set up those forwarders for you. We can do a mass forwarder set up so that you don’t have to use the control panel interface to set up each and every one of them. Remember, forwarding mail off of the server is a bad idea that will lead to our server becoming blacklisted. It is really preferred that you use forwarders internally, within your domain.

For information on setting your default address to discard message at SMTP time, see our guide which gives great details on how to set this up.

We have been sending out notices regarding the usage of client’s default addresses. The last notice we sent detailed some changes being proposed in regards to your default address. This post will aim to describe those proposals in further detail.

These are just proposals, nothing is set in stone just yet. We are receiving feedback concerning these proposals and will make a decision on implementing these procedures at a later date.

Right now we have about 80% compliance in regards to the recommended default address usage. I would prefer to get this up to 90% or higher before making any changes.

The first proposal has to do with users that forward their default address off of the server to a third-party e-mail address. Our studies have shown that your default address is just going to receive a lot of spam. It may receive some legitimate mails, but for the most part, these legitimate mails can be weeded out by setting up specific mail accounts or specific forwarders for those real e-mail addresses.

Just take a moment and consider this:

If a spammer wanted to get their spam message to as many people as possible, do you really think it would bother them to send the same spam message to tom@yourdomain, ted@yourdomain.com, sally@yourdomain.com, jim@yourdomain.com, etc? Spammer’s don’t care. If the absolute only e-mail address on your domain that you use is john@yourdomain.com then why should you concern yourself with all of those illegitimate addresses on your domain?

The problem with forwarding your default address off of the server, is that each time the spammer sends their spam message to tom@yourdomain.com, ted@yourdomain.com, sally@yourdomain.com, and jim@yourdomain.com then you are effectively sending spam to a third part e-mail address. This will cause the server to become blacklisted. When the server becomes blacklisted, nobody will be able to send out mail from the server.

I do realize that there are some circumstances where you may feel that your default address is necessary. I understand this. I am just asking that you understand why forwarding your default address is such a bad thing. The best way I know to combat this, is that if you are forwarding your default address off of the server, then any message destined for your default address would be automatically rejected. It is not fair to the rest of the users on the server to have to face a server blacklisting because a single user on the server wants to forward their default address off of the server. If you want to use your default address, that is fine, you just need to set it to be delivered locally.

The second proposal has to do with SpamAssassin and your default address. Again, because your default address just receives an inordinate amount of spam, using SpamAssassin to filter spam messages on your account is just wasting resources. If you know that a large percentage of messages coming into an account are spam messages, then why bother checking those messages for a spam score? This just results in a waste of server resources that could be better utilized in other areas.

Again, this won’t stop you from using your default address. It will just stop your account from being able to use SpamAssassin. It is just part of the cost involved in using this type of set up. If using your default address is absolutely vital to the well-being of your account, then not having access to SpamAssassin shouldn’t bother you. If you feel that SpamAssassin is absolutely necessary for your account, then you need to ask yourself if your default address is necessary.

These changes are just part of our aim to provide our clients with the best server performance and stable hosting environment.

We are receiving a lot of replies from these notices concerning how to set your default box or how to set your default box for subdomains or addon domains. This is all detailed in the link that is included in the message.

There is a wealth of information included at:

http://manual.amstechdns.com/setdefault

This link is included in the notice that we are sending out. I don’t mind you asking questions regarding this, but it will serve everyone a lot better and you will get this resolve a lot more quickly if you will read through the message and the links that are sent with the notice. Most of the questions we have been asked regarding this are answered at the above link or somewhere within the message.