Announced today

[ian@huth]

Originally Posted by James79

Hopefully this will kick in very quickly.

Over the past few weeks, the number of spam emails that I am receiving has been increasing from three per day to an all time high of almost forty today. For example, today I had 40 new emails - I thought - good grief, Im even more popular than I thought!!! Unfortunately, 37 of these were Spam offering me all sorts of services from spam filtering and virus protection software, pain relief methods, and even viagra and such likes. Im not so naive as to do anything other than to delete the messages concerned but it is becoming a bit annoying to have to delete loads of emails. Is it any wonder Ntls servers keep on going offline.

James

I have noticed that my spam has increased dramatically in the last week or so. It makes me laugh what some of them are trying on. One of them was offering a Visa card validation service which you joined by entering all your visa card details, name, address, telephone number, security questions used and answers, passwords, etc and paid the fee of $29.95 using that card. I've heard of trojans and other methods used to get some of these details but to get you to pay them and get your details at the same time is taking the p1ss.

[swoop101]

Well I don't know if it is a coincidence or not but my spam has halved in the past two days.

[Ramrod]

Originally Posted by andygrif

Is there a link anywhere?

EDIT: Found it.....

http://www.ntlworld.com/help/aup/anti_spam.php

That is great news........nice one ntl!

[darren]

I've also noticed that for the last 3 days my spam has more than halved, I used to get over 100 email a day from NTL, almost all filtered out by SpamPal , if NTL are doing this then I'm impressed, however I hope that no emails get deleted.

I personally like Wanadoo spam management, they tag all posible spam messages by adding ***SPAM*** to the subject line which makes filtering them much quicker and easier. I'd prefer if NTL would do the same, then I can decide what to do with them.

Yes I'm getting a reduction.As I've paid for a years subscription of Cloudmark's Spamnet I'm rather annoyed as I've got that set up just right to deal with my spam.I note that it was decent of NTL to do this BUT I wish they had done it sooner BEFORE I paid a years subscription.

Sighhhhh!

Incog.

[allanprg]

Yes I've noticed a reduction in the amount of spam emails received recently. Looks like NTL are blocking the spam alright.
The email from friends and family are getting through okay. As are the few newsletters I subscribe to. None of the usual spam junk.
That is much better.I was just about to invest in a spam filter software. Now I'll leave that alone. Lets hope for good.

[sherer]

i don't think this has been turned on yet and i'm getting more than ever. Now getting stuff for watches as well as all the other stuff as well.

Looks like NTL is starting to offer a better service though and it's about time they started to roll something like this out.

[James79]

As I have previously stated, I was receiving a large amount of spam daily over the last four or five weeks.

Im not sure what has happened but at risk of speaking too soon, I have received no spam at all for the past few days and even then it was only one. Hope it lasts and turns out that the so-called spammer has given up his attacks.

James

[mrm1]

Ive had 200 spams on one of my accounts in the last 24 hours. Definitly not switched on here.

[slowcoach]

Surely NTL would place the removed spam into a WebMail spam folder so that you could at least check that spam was really spam and there should also be a control so that you can block/unblock spam otherwise if the system is on auto-pilot some genuine mail is always going to vanish into the ether with no option to allow it.

Doesn't add up........

[mrm1]

I dont suppose we have any firm dates from anyone yet, or is it "Coming soon"

[SMHarman]

Originally Posted by badnbusy

Might be to some, but....the problem is - NO spam filter is 100% accurate. So...what happens to the emails that get accidentally caught (and probably deleted) by mistake. You will never even receive the email as it will be killed at the server.
<snip>
Fully agree with the virus scanning though. Good job ntl...

Originally Posted by How accurate is the filtering?

The first and most important measure of the accuracy of any spam filtering system is that the number of genuine e-mails wrongly identified as spam should be as close to zero as possible. There is, however, always a very small chance that a non-spam e-mail will trigger a filtering rule by mistake - this is known as a "false positive". Brightmail claim a false positive rate of just one per one million. This means that if the system decides that a mail is spam, then it is almost certainly spam.
The second measure of accuracy is that the number of spam messages that escape the filtering system (a "false negative"), should also be as low as possible. However, because the primary objective is to reduce the number of false positives to almost zero, it does inevitably mean that some actual spam will slip through. Brightmail claim to be more than 90% effective in identifying spam. For more information see the Brightmail website

No filtering system is 100% effective at identifying spam e-mail. If your address is targeted before Brightmail has set-up rules to recognise a particular piece of spam (Brightmail claims to update their rule-sets within a few minutes of seeing a sample), then you'll be unlucky enough to receive some spam. Demon believes that this is a very effective spam-filtering system and recommends customers use it to reduce the volume of unsolicited e-mail.

Please do NOT contact Demon Support if you do still receive an occasional e-mail which is spam. Whilst the Demon anti-spam filtering service should detect most spam, it is not guaranteed to remove all such messages. You can, however, help to further improve the accuracy of the filtering by submitting copies of unfiltered spam, or legitimate e-mail incorrectly identified as spam, to a special forwarding address.

Demon put brightmail antispam on their mailservers last year about 6 months before I finally cancelled all my demon mail services and let me tell you it's fab.

Brightmail use no auto filtering, but manually parse to generate rules for new spam (so some numpty who cannot be botherd to unsubscribe from the ebuyer mailshot cannot get that turned to a spam rule at the click of a button). They also have many many unannouced mail boxes setup across the internet on most ISPs. As the existance of these boxes has never been published, if a mail arrives in one of them it must be unsolicited and a rule is then generated.

Because of this a more spam will get through than some more aggressive applications, but the 0 false positive is the result NTL are looking for, not 0 spam.

IMHO NTL have the right spam package in place, if it works as well as Demons you will be very happy mail users, oh and I think Demon found it reduced mail traffic by 40% and thus extended the life of their mail servers by another couple of years.

This is the Demon FAQ on the matter, I imagine NTLs implimentation will be similar.

http://www.demon.net/helpdesk/faq/spamfiltering.shtml

With the demon implementation it was certainly rolled out, some of my accounts being filtered weeks before others, when I asked they said it was to ramp up the utilisation of the filtering servers gradually and ensure they were stable as more accounts were punted through them, rather than flood them and have the whole mail system collapse.

[agentsmith]

I have been regularily receiving in the region of 150 spam messages a day, but in the last few days its dropped to less than 40 - well done NTL

[Ian Goldby]

Originally Posted by slowcoach

Surely NTL would place the removed spam into a WebMail spam folder so that you could at least check that spam was really spam and there should also be a control so that you can block/unblock spam otherwise if the system is on auto-pilot some genuine mail is always going to vanish into the ether with no option to allow it.

Well, my experience is that legitimate (non-spam) emails do get blocked. There is no WebMail folder for blocked messages, and there is no customer option to change the filtering. Nice one, NTL

[allieyoung666]

No spam here horray!!!!!