January 27, 2006 - MMCIS/me adds simscan queue management to block spam/virus from being queued

Starting on January 27, 2006, MMCIS/me, our managed email service, is using an open source spam/virus queue management routine called simscan. Prior to this, MMCIS/me would scan each incoming mail and if the message was determined to be spam, the message would be put in the target mail box with a modification to the headers which added the reason for the determination that this was spam, as well as the string ****spam**** in the subject so that each user could easily build a filter to dispose of spam.

The advantage of this method was that good mail that might be marked as spam would still be received and the user could find that message in his/her spam or trash folder.

The disadvantage, especially for those who use the web based interface mail client, was that the mail client filters were not executed and so the spam marked email was visible in the inbox.

After more than a year of experience, we were getting no reports of false positives, and many complaints about having to wade through the marked spam messages so the decision was made to implement outright rejection of spam rather than queueing the marked messages.

Please let us know if you are finding that good email is not being received. As always the more detail you give us the more efficiently we can investigate. At a minimum, let us know the sender email, recipient email, and approximate date/time of the email.