Bobcares.com provides outsourced hosting support to web hosts. Many of our customers prefer to use Help Desk as the primary support channel, and often seek our assistance in configuring it the best way possible.

A common issue reported by some of these web hosts is constant spam in their ticketing system. It robs the support team of valuable productive time, and frankly, is a nuisance.

Today, we’ll take a look at the top 5 solutions we implement to prevent spam in support tickets.

1. Enable captcha in support forms

Many web hosts use a form in their website to let customers contact support. But we’ve seen a lot of these forms lacking security features such as Captcha.

Almost all web-based spam is sent by spam bots. These can be blocked by using a strong captcha such as Google’s reCaptcha.

However, reCaptcha doesn’t work out of the box with some web platforms. That is where our development team steps in to smoothly integrate strong Captcha systems to existing websites without breaking any existing features.

Google’s reCaptcha is easy for customers to use, but effective in blocking bots.

2. Enable client login to support forms

Another easy way to block spam bots is to use client login to be able to send support requests.

Since the form can be accessed only after the customer logs in with a password, spam bots can never abuse it.

In such websites, sales inquiries are usually handled over live chat or phone which is not a spam target.

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3. Implement anti-spam filters in mail queue

There are also cases where the business model of the web host requires direct mails to the support team (eg. to support@webhost.com).

In such cases, the best defense is to use anti-spam systems like SpamAssassin, DSpam or ASSP to scan the body of a mail, and send it to the spam folder.

However, we’ve seen situations where many legitimate mails were mis-classified as spam. To prevent such instances, we periodically review the spam folder and re-train the spam filter to classify valid mails as not-spam.

4. Use SMTP level spam filters

Spam mails are often sent by automated programs, and fail basic RFC verification checks.

We implement anti-spam filters at the SMTP connection level, so that mails 99% of spam is blocked before it even reaches the mail queue. Some of these tests are:

• IP black list check – Mails from IPs listed in reputed block lists such as SpamHaus is blocked.
• RFC compliance check – If the format of SMTP communication is wrong, it is blocked.
• Reverse DNS check – If the mail server does not have a valid hostname, the IP is likely to be an infected computer.
• Sender call-outs – Use automated checks to see if the sender address is actually valid before accepting a mail.

Before implementing any of these tests, we analyze the kind of mail traffic coming to the server so that we can be sure none of the legitimate mails are discarded.

Periodically, we audit the mail logs to check if any mail that looked legitimate (eg. with a valid Ticket ID) was caught by the filter. If so, we modify the rules so that valid mails always gets through to the support desk.

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5. Block spam with keywords

Some HelpDesk systems such as WHMCS allows customized Spam Filtering. We use systems like that to filter out un-solicited mails from forums, marketing agencies, etc. We build custom filtering rules using mail subject, sender, body, and more to filter out mails that gets past all other filters.

All these steps taken together results in a clean help desk that helps the support team quickly attend to customer requests.