Had enough SPAM?

Had enough?

Had enough yet?

Since the start of school, our staff has seen a significant increase in incoming spam.  We’ve been following the recommendations from the company,  including various changes to the system and even updating to a newer version.  However, none of the suggestions are making things better, in fact, there seems to be more spam getting through since the upgrade.

A few weeks ago, we stated that if the problem wasn’t resolved, that we would shop for another solution – and that time has come.

We have a competitive product that we’d like to test out, but wanted to make sure that staff was aware that changing products will mean….

1) Staff will no longer receive the daily spam summary emails (none of the other competitors had this feature).  Instead, there is a website that you have to visit in order to see any messages that are blocked.

2) We will copy over as many of our existing preferences as we can – but its likely that shifting to a new product will likely allow more spam through for a short time period.  At least until we can adjust the system after its up and running.

3) Good news – the solution we will test allows each person to set their own preference relating to how much or how little spam you can tolerate.  This will be a welcomed addition, as each user tends to have a different tolerance level.

At this time, we have a competitive solution on-site and are working to configure it.  It will likely be later this week before we can put in place for testing.

Update on email routing issues…

While I was out on vacation, several email carriers flagged @wdmcs.org emails and labeled us as a known spam source, which created issues for WDM staff members to use email to reach parents/community members using specific email carriers.

Short version is this:   After working on the issue for the past 4 days (most of the work/changes done to resolve the issue was done yesterday), we are down to having issues with @mchsi.com only.  As of this morning, we validated that the remaining carriers (aol and yahoo) were cleared up.

All the details… the story/status with each specific email carrier.

MediaCom @mchsi.com……………….
MediaCom received enough complaints from their users that they flagged us as a known spam source.  Tech support originally released the block on Tuesday, but we were added back on Thursday morning.  The current status is that none of our messages are getting through to @mchsi.com, but we do have another ticket open with them to see if we can resolve the issue again.

Aol.com……
Aol also received a large number of complaints from their users about our email, however, AOL was kind enough to share with me the exact emails that caused the problems.  Unfortunately, the emails were our Campus messenger blasts reminding families of upcoming registration, so it’s not really spam, but the families submitted to aol as spam.  I finished up working with AOL yesterday and the tests from this morning are showing that everything is cleared up with aol, however, we be monitoring it over the next few days.

Yahoo.com…..
Yahoo also labeled us a spam source based on the fact that other carriers did it as well.  They didn’t acknowledge any complaints from their users, it appears that they just followed suit since the other carriers did it.  Again, from testing this morning, the yahoo routing is testing out ok.

Will this be a problem again this year?
Potentially, yes, I believe it will.  It’s an issue of reputation.  Once your email domain (@wdmcs.org) has been flagged by major carriers as spam, they lower your email reputation (sort of like a credit rating). It’s likely that we’ll have to keep closer tabs on email routing, at least for the next several months.