As the summer winds down, I look at what one of Webmail’s newest stars has been able to do with our anti-spam system in just 3 months.  This summer Mike T:

(1) built new software that integrates customers’ existing sender safelists with Postfix so that mail not only bypasses spam content filtering (as it always has), it also makes sure that the mail doesn’t get rejected during the SMTP session.  (and the reverse for blacklists);

(2) enhanced our safelist and blacklisting system to allow customers to block or accept mail from specific IP addresses; and

(3) added selective greylisting capabilities to our SMTP servers.

#1 and #2 have been released and we began rolling out #3 last week.  As of Friday, we are greylisting mail that arrives to catch-all mailboxes and everything that hits our mx2 servers.  Soon we will also be greylisting mail sent from dynamic IP ranges such as computers connected behind DSL and Cable networks.  And in a few weeks customers will have the option to turn on greylisting for all mail they receive from new sources (this will be disabled by default).  Fyi, much of this was built around a great open-source project called Policyd.

Anyways, I am damn proud of Mike.