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Spam Hammer is a method of defending e-mail users against spam by “temporarily rejecting” any email from a sender it does not recognize. If the mail is legitimate, the originating server will, after a delay, try again and if sufficient time has elapsed, the email will be accepted.

If the mail is from a spammer it will probably not be retried since a spammer goes through thousands of email addresses and typically cannot afford the time delay to retry.

What are some spamming sources?

• These are often virus infected home PCs.
• Occasionally they are infected web servers (including scripts on some servers).
• In many cases, they are a dedicated spam server with too many addresses to bother retrying. Many do retry after a few seconds (thus the +11 second requirement) when deferred.

I tried it out for a week, it is highly effective anti-spam technique. It is also called greylisting (check wikipedia)

 

Why it works

Greylisting is effective because many mass email tools used by spammers will not bother to retry a failed delivery, so the spam is never delivered. A spam sender may retry with a different sender, and possibly a different message, because it has a queue of victims rather than the proper queue of messages that regular mail servers maintain.

In addition, if a spammer does retry a delivery after the waiting period has expired, any one of a number of automated spamtraps will have had a good chance of identifying the spam source and listing both the source and the particular message in their databases. Thus, these subsequent attempts are more likely to be detected as spam by other mechanisms than they were before the greylisting delay.

Disadvantages

The biggest disadvantage of greylisting is that it destroys the near-instantaneous nature of email that users have come to expect. Mail from unrecognised senders is delayed by typically about 15 minutes, and up to four hours. A customer of a greylisting ISP can not always rely on getting every email in a pre-determined amount of time.

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Some users wants to shared their multidomain capability of their hosting account with their friends but limit by the “single” login to the Cpanel. Meaning, if the owner doesn’t wants to share the cpanel login to other user/admin. He or she will not able to create email account by themselves.

I have found a solution from web, a PHP script that will automate the email account creation without login into CPanel.

The script should work on most CPanel control panel with some modification to theme. I have tested it on Hostmonster and it works perfectly.

Download the script here, AtomicEmailHM.zip

The script above no longer works . Please refer to https://sourceforge.net/projects/cpanelemail/ for updated script. (thanks to xphantoman)

Read the readme file in the archieve for instruction.

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Note : the $skin variable in the config.php file.  Check your cpanel url on browser for the correct value IF you are not using hostmonster.

e.g. If your Cpanel control panel looks like

http://www.yourdomain.com:2082/frontend/x3/index.html

the $skin variable should set to

$skin= “x3″;

About author : This original article is property of Top 10 Web Hosting (http://www.top10webhosting.com). List of best web hosting services company offering PHP and MySQL. Compare & save ! on web hosting fee.

Note : Please include author information if you wish to republish this article.

Question : Someone is sending spam and using my email address as the return path. I am getting 100′s of 550 error messages returned to my inbox. Any suggestions on how to correct this without deleting my email address?

Answer :

There is effectively nothing you can do about this, except to wait for it to stop.

Forging a return address on email is no more difficult than writing a letter, putting it in an envelope, putting someone else’s return address on the upper left corner, and dropping it in a mailbox.

If you’re using an email client program like Outlook to fetch your messages, you could set up a rule that looks for something in the subject line, for example, that identifies these bounce messages, and moves them all to a junk folder, for easier deletion.

Usually, the spammers don’t keep using the same address for too long – if they did, they’d start getting blocked. So, they switch spoof addresses pretty regularly, and your bulging mailbox should return to normal.

Also, check your website for any security holes, spammer may have used your scripts’ security bug to send spam.

About author : This original article is property of Top 10 Web Hosting (http://www.top10webhosting.com). List of best web hosting services company offering PHP and MySQL. Compare & save ! on web hosting fee.

Note : Please include author information if you wish to republish this article.