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I installed the free Compass trial for 30 days. I was very happy with the results so on Sunday I upgraded to the paid version of Compass for $299 with the help of one of Declude's support techs (via email). Ever since the paid upgrade (on Sunday) the scoring system has stopped working properly. I am getting nailed with spam. Declude appears to be scanning the messages according to the email headers, it's just not giving proper scores on the email, which determines whether it goes in the junk email folder or not. I have not changed anything on my server, and decludeproc is running fine.

 According to their website they were closed for the weekend & Presidents Day, and open at 8:30 am (eastern time). I have been calling all morning long, left messages, submitted a ticket on Sunday when this started and still I cannot get a hold of anyone at Declude.

 I'm starting to wonder if I made the wrong choice of paying the $299... Does anyone know why the scoring would stop working upon purchasing the version? Anyone know why they are not answering their phones? Help me I am in spam hell. My clients are calling and are hyper... I received almost 300 spam myself last night alone.

I am using Declude since more then 2 years now and never had issues with their support. I am their premium reseller and sold number of declude licenses to my customers and always received their quality support even on weekends by Linda and David.  

 Did you restart the service after Declude was renewed ? You need to do it so new license can take effect. Also did you see if the new log files are generated? If declude is running it should. Also when you ask them for trial they give you the full security suite and now you renewed the only compass part which means you dont get AVG and Commtouch ZEROHOUR. What I have noticed that Zerohour plays a big role in eliminating spam. Thats probably the reason why you are getting lots of spam now. I'll suggest you to refer your old logs ( when trial was on ) and new logs  ( when you are running Compass ) and see if thats the reason. They also have lots of sample filters on their site. If you configure it I am sure you'll see significant difference. I have good experience with Declude and if you want me to review its configuration and settings on your machine then feel free to contact me.

Regards

I am using Declude since more then 2 years now and never had issues with their support. I am their premium reseller and sold number of declude licenses to my customers and always received their quality support even on weekends by Linda and David.  

 Did you restart the service after Declude was renewed ? You need to do it so new license can take effect. Also did you see if the new log files are generated? If declude is running it should. Also when you ask them for trial they give you the full security suite and now you renewed the only compass part which means you dont get AVG and Commtouch ZEROHOUR. What I have noticed that Zerohour plays a big role in eliminating spam. Thats probably the reason why you are getting lots of spam now. I'll suggest you to refer your old logs ( when trial was on ) and new logs  ( when you are running Compass ) and see if thats the reason. They also have lots of sample filters on their site. If you configure it I am sure you'll see significant difference. I have good experience with Declude and if you want me to review its configuration and settings on your machine then feel free to contact me.

Regards

 Linda did get back with me. Apparantly she emailed me back and it got deleted because I thought it was spam. :( But I did talk to her and you are right the Commtouch was disabled when I purchased Compass... I had the 30 day Compass trial, which included Commtouch, and when you purchase Compass it does not include Commtouch. So I was not aware that it would not be the same product for the $299. Comtouch is an additional $900.

Linda was nice enough to log on to my server and look at my filters and set them up a bit so we can try to achive similar results as the Commtouch. But I haven't seen any improvment, I am getting on average at least 1 spam per few minutes to my personal email address (hundreds per day) when with the Commtouch I would get maybe 10 spam per day tops. 

 Do you have any filtering suggestions that you can give me? I don't think we can swing the extra $$ for Commtouch right now but I have to do something. 

These are the filters I use myself :

#==========================================================================================#
#     FILTERS         #
#==========================================================================================#

#GOOD-REVDNS  filter C:\SmarterMail\declude\filters\GOOD-REVDNS.txt  x 0 0
#CB-ATTACH  filter C:\SmarterMail\declude\filters\CB-ATTACH.txt  x 0 0

FILTER-ADULT  filter C:\SmarterMail\declude\filters\FILTER-ADULT.txt  x 0 0
#FILTER-BULK  filter C:\SmarterMail\declude\filters\FILTER-BULK.txt  x 0 0
#FILTER-CID  filter C:\SmarterMail\declude\filters\FILTER-CID.txt  x 0 0
#FILTER-COUNTRY  filter C:\SmarterMail\declude\filters\FILTER-COUNTRY.txt x 0 0
FILTER-DRUGS  filter C:\SmarterMail\declude\filters\FILTER-DRUGS.txt  x 0 0
#FILTER-EDU  filter C:\SmarterMail\declude\filters\FILTER-EDU.txt  x 0 0
#FILTER-FINANCE  filter C:\SmarterMail\declude\filters\FILTER-FINANCE.txt x 0 0
#FILTER-FORGED  filter C:\SmarterMail\declude\filters\FILTER-FORGED.txt x 0 0
#FILTER-GAMBLING filter C:\SmarterMail\declude\filters\FILTER-GAMBLING.txt x 0 0
#FILTER-IMG  filter C:\SmarterMail\declude\filters\FILTER-IMG.txt  x 0 0
#FILTER-INK  filter C:\SmarterMail\declude\filters\FILTER-INK.txt  x 0 0
#FILTER-LOTTO  filter C:\SmarterMail\declude\filters\FILTER-LOTTO.txt  x 0 0
FILTER-MEDICAL  filter C:\SmarterMail\declude\filters\FILTER-MEDICAL.txt x 0 0
FILTER-PHISH  filter C:\SmarterMail\declude\filters\FILTER-PHISH.txt  x 0 0
FILTER-REPLICA  filter C:\SmarterMail\declude\filters\FILTER-REPLICA.txt x 0 0
#FILTER-SCAM  filter C:\SmarterMail\declude\filters\FILTER-SCAM.txt  x 0 0
#FILTER-SOFTWARE filter C:\SmarterMail\declude\filters\FILTER-SOFTWARE.txt x 0 0
#FILTER-SUBJECT  filter C:\SmarterMail\declude\filters\FILTER-SUBJECT.txt x 0 0
#FILTER-SPAM  filter C:\SmarterMail\declude\filters\FILTER-SPAM.txt  x 0 0
#FILTER-STOCKS  filter C:\SmarterMail\declude\filters\FILTER-STOCKS.txt x 0 0
#FILTER-ZOMBIE  filter C:\SmarterMail\declude\filters\FILTER-ZOMBIE.txt x 7 0

FILTER-NOSENDER  filter C:\SmarterMail\Declude\filters\FILTER-NOSENDER.txt x  0 0
FILTER-BACKSCATTER  filter C:\SmarterMail\Declude\filters\FILTER-BACKSCATTER.txt  x  0 0

And if you decide to get Commtouch then I'll be able to provide you on discounted competative prices. If you are interested you can email me or catch me on MSN ( Rubal {at] Rubal [dot]Net )

 Thanks,

We've always gotten excellent support from Declude. We used it at the ISP I used to work for, and I set it up and have finally gotten it tweaked for the company I work for now. I've been improving it's filtering over the 2 months I've been here. We're using greylisting, Commtouch, Invuribl, VSimage, and only slightly modified RBL's from the default RBL's. We've added some filters from MailPure, and the One-Liners filter is a modified version of MailPure's IPLinked filter that we made look at the class c of ip's for the link in spam email that had a few words of text and a link to an ip address that I had our 300 users forwarding to me. No one has forwarded any of them to me for about a week now. We now get almost no spam at all. It's been over a week since I've even gotten a single spam email into my Junk E-mail folder. This setup works extremely well. Be careful of the Forged filter if you want to be able to receive email from Yahoo. It caught every email from Yahoo when we tested it. I would definately recommend using greylisting which is free and decreased the total amount of email we receive by around 70%. I would also recommend using Invuribl which is very affordable. It gets hits on about 24% of the email coming in. Commtouch is currently getting hits on about 26% of the email coming in.

FILTER-ONE-LINERS filter d:\smartermail\declude\filters\FILTER-One-Liners.txt x 0 0
FILTER-ADULT  filter d:\smartermail\declude\filters\FILTER-ADULT.txt  x 0 0
#FILTER-BULK  filter d:\smartermail\declude\filters\FILTER-BULK.txt  x 0 0
#FILTER-CID  filter d:\smartermail\declude\filters\FILTER-CID.txt  x 0 0
FILTER-COUNTRY  filter d:\smartermail\declude\filters\FILTER-COUNTRY.txt x 0 0
FILTER-DRUGS  filter d:\smartermail\declude\filters\FILTER-DRUGS.txt  x 0 0
#FILTER-EDU  filter d:\smartermail\declude\filters\FILTER-EDU.txt  x 0 0
#FILTER-FINANCE  filter d:\smartermail\declude\filters\FILTER-FINANCE.txt x 0 0
#FILTER-FORGED  filter d:\smartermail\declude\filters\FILTER-FORGED.txt x 0 0
#FILTER-GAMBLING filter d:\smartermail\declude\filters\FILTER-GAMBLING.txt x 0 0
#FILTER-IMG  filter d:\smartermail\declude\filters\FILTER-IMG.txt  x 0 0
#FILTER-INK  filter d:\smartermail\declude\filters\FILTER-INK.txt  x 0 0
#FILTER-LOTTO  filter d:\smartermail\declude\filters\FILTER-LOTTO.txt  x 0 0
#FILTER-MEDICAL  filter d:\smartermail\declude\filters\FILTER-MEDICAL.txt x 0 0
FILTER-PHISH  filter d:\smartermail\declude\filters\FILTER-PHISH.txt  x 0 0
FILTER-REPLICA  filter d:\smartermail\declude\filters\FILTER-REPLICA.txt x 0 0
#FILTER-SCAM  filter d:\smartermail\declude\filters\FILTER-SCAM.txt  x 0 0
FILTER-SOFTWARE  filter d:\smartermail\declude\filters\FILTER-SOFTWARE.txt x 0 0
#FILTER-SUBJECT  filter d:\smartermail\declude\filters\FILTER-SUBJECT.txt x 0 0
#FILTER-SPAM  filter d:\smartermail\declude\filters\FILTER-SPAM.txt  x 0 0
FILTER-STOCKS  filter d:\smartermail\declude\filters\FILTER-STOCKS.txt x 0 0
#FILTER-ZOMBIE  filter d:\smartermail\declude\filters\FILTER-ZOMBIE.txt x 7 0
FILTER-ECARD  filter d:\smartermail\declude\filters\SPAM-ECARD.txt  x 0 0
FOREIGN   filter  d:\SmarterMail\Declude\Filters\Foreign.txt              x 0 0   
TLD-AFRICAN  filter  d:\SmarterMail\Declude\Filters\TLD-African.txt          x 3 0   
TLD-ASIAN  filter  d:\SmarterMail\Declude\Filters\TLD-Asian.txt            x 3 0   
TLD-CARIBBEAN  filter  d:\SmarterMail\Declude\Filters\TLD-Caribbean.txt        x 3 0   
TLD-CENTRALAMERICAN filter  d:\SmarterMail\Declude\Filters\TLD-CentralAmerican.txt  x 3 0   
TLD-EASTERNEUROPEAN filter  d:\SmarterMail\Declude\Filters\TLD-EasternEuropean.txt  x 3 0   
TLD-MIDDLEEASTERN filter  d:\SmarterMail\Declude\Filters\TLD-MiddleEastern.txt    x 3 0   
TLD-OCEANIC  filter  d:\SmarterMail\Declude\Filters\TLD-Oceanic.txt          x 3 0   
TLD-SOUTHAMERICAN filter  d:\SmarterMail\Declude\Filters\TLD-SouthAmerican.txt    x 3 0
TLD-WESTERNEUROPEAN filter  d:\SmarterMail\Declude\Filters\TLD-WesternEuropean.txt x 3 0

Thank you both for your suggestions. I do want to say that Linda has been great, and bent over backwards to help me out. But I want to make clear to others that may be wanting to purchase Compass for the $300- If you are trying it out, CommTouch is turned on in the trial. But if you want the CommTouch it's an additional $900. I was a little confused on this after my trial until Linda explained it. I think the extra $900 is definitely worth it because it's a great product, but in our case we weren't expecting to pay the extra amount so I was suprised.

Do you use more than one domain? If not, there is a version of Declude Security Suite that includes AVG and CommTouch for $395 / year. We were able to go with it and the 250 domain, 1000 user version of SmarterMail Enterprise for $510, but only use 1 domain. We bought them both from Declude at the same time, so they have no problem with it. When I worked for the ISP, we had to use the Service Provider version for $1850 / year that includes AVG and Sniffer.