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The growth of Spam (unsolicited bulk email) has grown in 2003 to the point where it is severely damaging the utility of email as a communication medium.
As part of the fight against this menace we make the following commitments:
If you too are troubled with Spam volumes we suggest you try out Mailwasher. There is a free trial period and a free functionally limited version. The key to activate the full version is a modest cost.
Addendum July 2005: In spite of two levels of mail filtering (Brightmail and Mailwasher) the level of spam and other garbage mail is approaching umanageable levels (200-300 per day). I am aware that I am losing valuable genuine mail and that periodically my outgoing mail fails due to the recipients filtering systems. If you are apparently not get replies from us, make sure your mail system allows mail from cactus-mall.com and email the address given in the above image.
Addendum November 2006: The situation continues to deteriorate. I now reject all mail to unconfigured mailboxes without examining it, so if you don't get our email address exactly right I will never see your email. I regret some with some people I am finding it almost impossible to get reliable email exchange because of the extremely heavy email filtering which has to cut out many thousands of junk messages which our systems receive daily. If you are having trouble getting a response from us you may have to resort to telephone or fax. I fear we are fast approaching the point where email as we know it will be unusable.
Addendum October 2007: This month the domain cactus-mall.com suffered a dictionary attack which nearly bought the server down. We had to suspend the use of all email on this domain for a number of days. We now have a further line of defence outside the domain as all incoming mail first goes to platform provided by MX Logic which will deflect all such attacks as well as combatting spam, viruses, phishing and various other email exploits. We have been forced to reduce the mail boxes on this domain to three, so only mail to cacti, tony and suzanne at cactus-mall.com will now be accepted. Mail to our email addresses in other domains is unaffected.
Demon have also upgraded their anti spam software and it is catching a higher proportion of spam entering our systems from other points than cactus-mall.com. I do fear however that genuine emails are being lost, so if we don't answer please try another route.
Because of the large volume of Spam we receive we have been forced into automated cleaning of our incoming mail using the software programme Mailwasher. This uses a number of techniques to detect and reject Spam and is proving extremely valuable to us.
