Zarr Blog :Experiences of running a UK web design company

I wrote just over a week ago about what Zarr does to stop spam emails.

We’ve just had an existing customer phone us and signup to using our spam filter. He was pretty cheesed off with himself, and you can see why from how the conversation went:

We get around 100-200 spam emails a day. I thought I was dealing with it okay, but amongst the spam, I deleted a genuine customer enquiry (which came through on a day I was on holiday) and I just happened to come across the deleted email when searching for something else. Although the lead came through about 4 weeks ago, I tried calling them back but they said that as we hadn’t replied, they didn’t think we were interested. I think the work would have been about £5000. ($10,000).

Our spam filtering doesn’t need any changes your end - instead we do a slight change to the domain name to tell it that all email goes through our spam filter first before it gets to you - and no changes needed on your end to Outlook.

If spam is becoming a problem, why not give us a try?

I don’t think there is anyone I know who doesn’t get spam email. Its a problem thats been around probably since the very early days of the Internet and continues to get worse.

My company provides website, database and email hosting for websites that we’ve developed, and also people who just want to host their own sites with us.

I think we are quite unique in the web-design world as we have our own servers - and by that I mean that we rent the racks, organise our own IP transit, and no-one else apart from authorised Zarr staff can access our servers. A lot of web design companies outsource the hosting to companies like HostEurope - which do offer cheap hosting, but you get what you pay for.

Anyway, back to spam. Zarr provides spam filtering facilities for quite a few companies and using our hardware spam firewalls, we receive each email, do a virus check on it first (using 3 virus definition providers), and then do spam checks - using Bayesian filters, intent analysis, known spam sources and other several other tests. The email is given an overall score which will determine whether it gets blocked immediately as spam, tagged as “possibly spam, but not 100% sure” and let through, quarantined or let through as “looks like genuine”.

Since January this year, the number of emails we filtered each day was relatively constant - about 250,000 +- 20% each day. Then on 28th June, this shot-up to about 650,000 literally overnight - without any specific new clients added to the system. it then stayed roughly constant until a few days ago when it peaked above 1,000,000 for the first time.

The peak and increase seems to be bad receipient and rate controlled emails - where they are targeting your email server with invalid domain names, or one source sending too many emails without a certain timeframe. Luckily, as we filter out over 95% of spam our customers are happy that they aren’t having to wade through a full mailbox each morning.

Zarr charges (at the time of writing) about £35 per user per year to filter email or about 67 pence per week. I’d estimate that if you are spending more than 30 seconds per day fighting spam in your mailbox, then you can benefit from Zarr filtering your spam email.