Ask YC: What do you do about spam?

[groovyone]

Hi all. We're a small team (5 people) but are inundated by spam. We've all got iPhones or Blackberrys and so have been looking for online solutions which will filter the spam out before the email hits our server. We tried one company, but they're wanting to charge us over $2000/year for this as a service and I was wondering what you do about spam? Are there any low cost (but good) services that you would recommend similar to the above?

Thanks!

[aaroneous]

This won't filter email before it hits your server, but if what you're really asking is filtering email before it hits your inbox, then we use spamassassin and it works great.

We have a few public email addresses on our site that aren't obfuscated in any way, and I'd say spamassassin misses maybe 1 or 2 spam messages every couple of days without any false positives. Granted, it will take some work to get it properly configured for your particular setup.

[bigtoga]

Find a host that allows you to use Postini. I found a host last week that lets you buy Postini for $1/mailbox. Postini was bought by google and my understanding is that it is the logic behind why gmail has so much less spam than others.

http://www.google.com/search?q=postini+email+hosting

[brion]

Yep use gmail,the cool thing is gmail will allow you to send emails from your gmail account that look like its coming from your work account.

[gaika]

google apps for domains will do the trick, you can set up wild card email address and forward everything to your own server.

[groovyone]

Wow, this sounds awesome. I'll go check it out. Hopefully I can then re-distribute this cleaned email. Thanks for the tip though. I'll report my findings and a "How To" here if I get it to work

[rms]

Definitely, Gmail has the best anti-spam implementation on the internet.