Really bad spam problem

T

therealtomlapp

New Member
Hi, I began working for a company as a testing engineer for handheld computers and batteries, but am also highly experienced in networking, xp, 2003, etc. The company I work for is pretty small, even though they have huge customers and do a lot of business. Lately they have been asking me to help them with a few computer problems that they had. So far they seem to completely trust me with their network, they allow me all access to the workstations and server. I have noticed a lot of serious problems that I am putting together in a report to submit to them next week. As well as me asking them for more money due to the fact that they are in need of a full time network admin to manage and maintain their network.

One of the problems they have is a ridiculous amount of spam. I mean I opened one email inbox this morning and counted about 300 with attachments just from overnight! I am in the process of trying to find out exactly where their email accounts are being held (what company, either out isp Comcast, or our hosting provider). They are currently using Outlook 2002, the workstations are all Windows XP pro, and the server is Windows Server 2003.

I don't have as much knowledge of email systems as I do with other elements of the network. All I know is everyone keeps telling me that when we switched to Comcast we started having problems. A lot of the spam messages actually appear to be coming off of our domain, for instance:

[email protected]
[email protected]

When I do a visual trace using the email headers, they are clearly coming from out of the country (spain, denmark, amsterdam, etc). I think it's obvious that we do not have any kind of spam protection.

Does spam blocking need to occur within outlook itself, or is that something that our email provider can provide to us. Also we can't enable the option to only receive emails from people in our safelists because we are always getting emails from new potential clients so that's out.

If anyone has any information that you think can help me, I would greatly appreciate it. If you need any more info I will try to get it and respond back. It's kind of tough because the owners of the company really don't know anything about computers so whenever I explain anything to them, they cut me off with "Tom, your going right over our heads, we trust you so just do what you gotta do"

Thank you
 
There should be security settings in Outlook that you can use to block spam. I'm pretty sure I saw them after I replaced my Grandmother's MoBo and CPU after it got trashed by a lightning storm...
 
yes you are right, but we only have Outlook 2002 and by what I read, outlook 2002 only has a 'manual' blocker that you have to update and configure yourself. Newer versions of outlook have an automatic filter which I would prefer, pretty much they want the sales people to be "hands off" when it comes to any maintenance or system settings. One of the main problems are getting emails that are made to look like their from our server. If I need to I am going to highly recommend they upgrade to the latest version of Outlook. Before doing that I want to see if there is something that can be done on the end of the mail hosting provider.
 
Right...

Well in outlook 2007 there is a spam filter in it and what ever mail washer pro (i use) doesn't get outlook gets.

But otherwise i would use Mailwasher Pro... i use it and it runs in the background and it can detect e-mails which could be spam. you can have a blocked list and friends list so an allow list.

Click here for Mailwasher Pro website
 
Ok, i'm back with some more information. I figured out one of the major problems. We use smartermail, which we use outlook to connect into. I logged into it using the root domain admin account and noticed that under spam filtering they had custom settings. Our domain name was in the list of servers to not be checked for spam. This was the reason why we were getting spam mails that appeared to come from our own email domain. I asked my boss why it was in there and he shrugged his shoulders and didn't really know. Then he said that we needed to be able to get emails from [email protected] and [email protected] since our website would compose emails to us giving us sales leads and such. So I told him that we need to remove the domain from the list, and add the individual email addresses instead. So I believe that we will no longer be getting these spoofed emails. Now to tackle the other spam mails. I made sure all the default recommended settings were set for bayesian, etc so were going to ride a couple of days and see what happens.

There are only 2 employees that seem to get a whole lot more spam than others. They told me they suspect a former employee that was fired and had something against them. They think that maybe this employee has been subscribing them to sites that send spam. Looks like it's going to be a fun battle.

Are there any legal stances we can take, can I begin generating a list of ip addresses and compose cease and desist letters. Do these companies have to legally stop if I tell them to?
 
you would need to put the e-mail address in the block list, or through your demain block that address... or IP address.
 
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