Spam and Virus Blocking
How It Works
Overview
Before it gets to you, your mail is delivered to our spam filters.
Once our filters receive a message, it is run through 12 different filters to search for spam, viruses, malware, or phishing attempts.
One of three things can happen to a given message:
- It’s clean and is delivered to your inbox.
- Is’s obviously spam or contains a virus, malware, or phishing attempts. These messages are outright blocked.
- It’s probably spam or contains malicious content, but the filter is not 100% certain. These suspected messages are held in a quarantine on our system. Each user has their own personal quarantine where they can view messages and deliver them if they like.
Included Feature or Stand-Alone
Spam & virus filtering is included as part of our Exchange Hosting service, but is can also be a stand-alone service if you do not want us to host your email. Spam/virus filtering works with all email platforms as long as you have your own domain. Stand-alone details and pricing can be found here.
Set-Up
Set up is simple. All you need to do is point your email delivery to us. This is done by changing your domain’s MX record. We will give you the information on how to do this and we will be available to help if needed.
What Happens After Set-Up?
Once the MX records are changed you’ll begin to notice a reduction in spam right away, but it won’t be in full effect until your MX change fully propagates across the web, anywhere from 2 to 24 hours. You will NOT lose any email during the switchover.
As soon as our filters detect a spam message being sent to one of your users’ addresses it will create a new account for that address and automatically send a welcome letter. That letter will contain info allowing the user to log into their web quarantine account. There the user can check in real time what messages are being tagged as possible spam. Users can also release any message, allow-list, block-list, set filtering preferences, etc.
Once a day each user will be sent a Quarantine Report. This is an email listing any messages that were quarantined as suspected spam over the past 24 hours. Users can release the message or allow-list it directly from this email.
This is the default setup and it works well for most customers. However if you require a different setup (e.g., don’t automatically email new users, adjust how the quarantine functions, etc.), please let us know. We can usually customize settings to our customers’ liking.
Our Service
We run high-end servers from Barracuda Networks as our back-end. The Barracuda Spam Firewall is the most widely deployed spam appliance in the market today, and is used by many Fortune 500 companies. We maintain redundant clusters of these systems to support our 99.999% uptime guarantee.
Most Frequently Asked…
Is there admin access to the Spam Filter?
Yes, assigned admins can change user settings & passwords, view the entire domain’s message log, set global allow-lists and global block-lists.
Can I strengthen or weaken the spam filter settings?
Yes. Our default settings usually work very well since we’ve tuned these over many years, but you can change those settings to make the filter stronger or weaker as needed. This can be done on a domain-wide lever and also on an individual level.