Ultima Hosts Worldwide Windows Hyper-V VPS Hosting

My clients and I are routinely barraged by some rather obnoxious, pushy salespeople.  Asking them to stop contacting doesn't work.  Landing it in a spam folder on the server or downstream at the recipient wastes CPU, bandwidth, and storage (I've been getting bonked by a fool at Cogent who likes to send me 3-5mb PowerPoints touting their offering du jour).  Deleting the message gives the sender no feedback that their crap is unwanted so they'll just keep sending it.

It would be nice to have an option for domain admins to build a blacklist of "obnoxious.jerk@somecompany.com" or "*.annoyingcompany.com" addresses that would be used as part of the SMTP blacklist/block check, rather than SmarterMail running filter rules after accepting a message.  The sender would get a NDR with something like "571 - Message refused" so they know what's happening to their stuff.  Provide an option for the admin to receive notification of attempts if desired.

Scan the list when it is being saved and eliminate any redundant domains/senders the spammer blacklists already have so the purpose of the feature remains clear:  keeping annoying people/companies that actually exist from getting through to you, not the Joe Jobbers.

Since Ultima uses SmarterMail, you should request this feature to them directly at www.SmarterTools.com

Here are a few ideas:

1. Use SmarterMail's Domain Content Filtering.  You can block all emails from a specific individual, or an entire domain, or via other criteria.  This way it never reaches your inbox.

2. Find out what blacklisting services that Ultima subscribes to and report their the offending domain to the blacklisting service.

In the end you would have to prove that these emails are SPAM before an ISP or Hosting company such as Ultima will block it, or potentially autoreply to it with a "Message refused" response.  Spam is not just unwanted or unsolicited email.  Plus, there may be other Ultima customers who want to receive these emails, so even having Ultima try to block them is not ideal.

Any legitimate company that sends you marketing email (solicited or not) is required to provide you with the option to "opt-out" of receiving future emails.  If they do not, or they ignore your opt-out request, they are in violation of the CAN-SPAM act, even though the email may or may not be SPAM.

The reason I was wondering about this ability was precisely to allow individual domains to reject email they have decided they don't want, without affecting any other domain.  I have a situation where TPTB *want* the senders (annoying cold-sales reps) to be told their messsages are being blocked from getting to the recipients...just vaporizing them doesn't tell those reps they're wasting their time.

The workaround we're using is rules in Outlook move them to public folder from each recipient based on the company identified in the message.  The message is then forwarded back to the originator with a rejection message included.  It's kludgey, and it eats the customer's bandwidth for receiving the message, downloading the message, and then forwarding it back.  Some of the incoming messages have attached or embeded marketing collateral that can make the message a few megabytes in size.

Putting this at the front-end, keeping the message from ever getting into SmarterMail is in the first place, so there's no need to maintain these filters (especially since the customer doesn't touch the SmarterMail controls themselves).