The One Time Spam Proved to be Useful

Posted by Kirby Turner on April 27, 2007

White Peak Software has a set of support email accounts. Each time an email is received it is logged to a tracking database and internal notification emails are sent out. In addition to responding to incoming email I review email messages marked as spam each day.

I noticed today the number of spam messages received had dropped to only 5. This seemed odd but a new grey listing anti-spam measure was also implemented this week on the mail server. I thought it was too good to be true that 99% of spam messages received were being filtered by the mail server. After all the mail server is configured to mark most spams not deleted them for fear of fault positives.

As it turns out the reduction in new spam messages was not the result of improved filtering but a problem with the tracking system. The support mail accounts have been overloaded the last 48 hours and the tracking system has been slow to catch up. The problem has been fixed and the queued messages are now being processed.

If it had not been for the reduced spam count the problem might have gone undetected for a longer period of time. For once spam proved to be useful.


Posted in business. Tagged in white peak software.


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