Last week, mail from the internet is about 40% (of messages our users receive) on an average week day and 80% on the weekend.
2 weeks ago, mail from the internet was over 60% during the week and over 95% on the weekend.

This big improvement is due to blocking instead of tagging with DNSBLs which rejects about 85% of the spam.

9 months ago, or so; I was working through an issue with Lotus support and was given an early version of a technote concerning the issue.  Trying to be a good Domino Admin citizen, I posted the information here on my blog.

Today, I received perhaps the most polite email request I've ever seen.  It requested that I pull the post because it contained names of Lotus employees and was not a final version of the technote.  I was also provided the correct url to the final technote on IBM's site.  I'm afraid that many other software companies would have jumped straight to threats of legal action.  How could I not respond positively to such a wonderfully respectful request.

Thanks Lotus for not being like the other guys.

We use a hybrid approach to stopping spam.  We use SpamKiller to score the message and then in the 'before new mail arrives' agent we add 5 to the score if it has been tagged by an RBL (we use only Spamhaus and Spamcop).  Then based on that score, users can send to a quarantine and/or JunkMail folder.

One week ago, I started saving my Spam.  These stats are from 9am Tuesday April 13 to April 20.

Count	Percent
1401	70.8%	blocked to quarantine (score over 8)
389	19.6%	JunkMail folder (score over 4.8)
190	9.6%	Inbox
1980		Total

> Previous statistics from 3 days during the first week of March.

Count	Percent
516	71.8%	blocked to quarantine (score over 8)
162	22.5%	JunkMail folder (score over 4.8)
41	5.7%	Inbox
719		Total

• Compared to only 6 weeks ago you can see that the % to my inbox is significantly higher
• SpamKiller and RBLs still block over 90%, but are less effective
• The average number per day went from 240 to 283 (18% increase)
• 1679 of the messages (85%) of the messages were tagged by Spamcop or Spamhaus
• 175 messages (almost 9%) were scored over 5.0 but were not tagged by a Blacklist, so SpamKiller is still earning it's keep

Yes, it has been over a month since I blogged, but I have a good excuse.  I moved.  Not to a new city, just a new house, but with a family of 8, things have been a little hectic.

OK, now on to the issue at hand.  We have a business partner who need to send us encrypted data.  He uses a personal Digital ID from Verisign to send encrypted files to all sorts of folks and so he asked us to get one too.  Seems like a reasonable request; but we run Notes so it took me 3 days of digging to figure out how do use the personal digital certificate from Verisign.

• Start here - https://digitalid.verisign.com/ to request the Personal Digital ID from Verisign.
• You will receive an email from Verisign with instructions on how to retrieve the ID and pull it into Internet Explorer.
• Once you have it in IE; select Tools - Internet Options, click the Content tab then the Certificates button.
• On the 'Personal' tab, select your certificate and click the Export button.
• Give it a name and save it do disk in PKCS 12 format

• Choose File - Security - User Security
• Click Your Identity and then Your Certificates
• Click the Get Certificates button and choose Import Internet Certificates
• Select the file that you saved above

As I mentioned on February 25 blocking executable attachments with server side rules gives us many advantages over using McAfee for this function.  Here is a dilog box of the rule and which extensions we block.


Note:  we also block .vb but that is a separate rule because we also use an exception.