Smile Internet Status & News

Spam continues to be our #1 issue on a day to day basis here at Smile. The volume of spam keeps growing, and recently has been overwhelming our spam filters. Last week we brought our newest spam filter online, and we are seeing less spam getting through, and mail is getting through the filters faster.

You have probably noticed the pdf spam, where you receive an email with a few words in the body and a pdf file attached. This one has been particularly hard to filter, without filtering wanted pdf files, since frequently people who are attaching pdf files type a few words into the body of the message, it’s almost impossible to get a computer to tell the difference.

We’re continuing to tweak the filters, to keep the spam to a minimum.

Yesterday one of Smile’s web servers saw a considerable slow down, at times, the server was unable to answer occasionally. We started troubleshooting and found it was a problem with a WordPress blog site, that appeared to be getting attacked from a site in China. We disabled the site, and brought the server back to 100%, eventually finding that there was some comment spam that was causing the blog to try and contact itself every second or two. That comment spam has been deleted and everything appears to be back to normal.