I've received a lot of spam lately, can you do something about it?

The nature of email spam is identical to junk postal mail and junk faxes. Just like your local postal office can't do much about junk mails that are sent to you everyday, neither can your ISP for your junk email (i.e. spam) problem. This view is not ours alone, you may wish to read a CNET News.com perspective to see that many others in the know think similarily. In addition, sending us the email addresses in your spam is just as ineffective a blocking technique as many spammers use fake email addresses. The truth is that most of the time, there is a limit to what we can do.

Nevertheless, we suggest you

1. as a first step, always install a good spam filter on your PC. AZC suggests (but as usual, we do not endorse) Spamkiller^™, a commercial counterpart of the well respected and widely used free UNIX spam filtering software SpamAssassin;
2. follow the recommendations given at Spam Recycling Center, and then urge your representatives in the government (e.g Congress officials) to enact laws that prohibit spamming.

Creating and maintaining spam filtering mechanisms are both a tedious and ongoing process. It's not something that a dedicated hosting company like AZC can afford to focus its limited resources on. AZC does, however, attempt to block all direct spamming sources.

If you wish the spam filtering to be performed on a server, rather than through a spam filtering program running on your PC, you can always purchase such filtering services at MailCircuit.com, SpamCop for instance, and use the Redirect feature of AZC's mail services to maintain a stationary Reply-to address. Having said the above, please note that any mention of an external sevice provider doesn't imply the endorsement of AZC.

Other methods such as the Challenge-Response system allow for spam reduction through redirection to a spam filtering provide, like Spamarrest.com. These services send an automated responds to the sender of the message, making them verify their identity before their message is allowed to arrive in your inbox.

In the future, AZC may partner with a server side spam filtering provider and provide such services on the server side as extra cost options. But for now, please follow our suggestions listed above. Please also review the FAQ "My PC spam filter doesn't do much for me, why doesn't AZC do such filtering on the server side?" too.

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