Filter mail before it touches your mail server
Designed for customers who run their own mail server or with a third party provider without the need for per user licensing, subscription update fees or system configuration woes - our External Spam and Virus Filtering product protect your business from harmful junk and potentially dangerous emails.
In very basic terms this is how the external filter processes your emails. Although the process looks simple hundreds of checks can be carried out on each and every email that is sent to your email addresses to determine, with an ultra high degree of accuracy, whether the email should be treated with as dangerous, potentially spam, or legitimate. All of the checks are completed in seconds, so there isn't any noticeable delay to your email.
In addition to offering email protection, our service acts as a backup solution queuing email for up to 7 days in the event your mail server or connectivity fails. Our subscription cost for this service is only £45 exc. VAT per year per domain.
Using this feature all emails which are considered as spam are moved to the mailbox you specify. This means you can still download them, but allow your mail program to handle them differently, or alternatively pass them all to one contact within your office who can check for any false positives.
Each suspected spam message can have its subject prefixed with a given word; the default being SPAM:. Thus, allowing you to download the messages locally along with all your other email and filter in your own mail client (eg direct them to a specific folder).
Use our systems to ensure no spam is ever sent to you. Our systems are upwards of 99% accurate in terms of identifying spam and as such you can have the confidence that only legitimate email will be routed to your mailbox. This is the default action for all virus borne emails.
Should your external mail server or connectivity fail then our servers will automatically queue your email for up to 7 days. Our systems will automatically de-queue once we detect your systems are backup. Alternatively a de-queue facility is available in the control panel, which can also allow you to direct mail to an alternative server for disaster recovery purposes.
Focusing on a self evolving point scoring system, all email is scanned and checked by thousands of different rules to check its validity. The higher the score, the more likely it is spam. The tolerance scale allows you to either increase or decrease the points required by our filter for a message to be considered as Spam.
Individual email addresses and domain names can be added to the allow list. As long as the source IP address isn't on a known block list the email will always be delivered to you no matter what scores may be applied due to the content it contains.
You can add individual email addresses or whole domain names to a block list. Any emails sent to you by these addresses will bounce back regardless of the content contained within them. This can help cut down unwanted or nuisance senders contacting you.
Most mail servers will have a fully qualified domain name associated to their server. This feature simply checks that the sending server have a valid PTR record, and if not the connection is dropped with an explanation (eg Sending IP address 1.2.3.4 has no reverse DNS). It can be enabled / disabled depending if you would like this be checked as part of the spam filtering routines.
Today, nearly all abusive e-mail messages carry fake sender addresses. Sender address forgery is a threat to users and companies alike, and it even undermines the e-mail medium as a whole because it erodes people's confidence in its reliability. The Sender Policy Framework (SPF) is an open standard specifying a technical method to prevent sender address forgery. Users are able to enable / disable this powerful check.
DNS block lists are used as a means of blocking sending servers that have a reputation for sending spam, and can considerably reduce the amount of spam received by a domain. Each list has its own policy regarding how servers are blocked, with some stricter than others. We have three levels to pick from allowing you to check how thorough you would like us to be. By default we recommend the 'basic' checks which include popular block lists such as SpamCop, Spamhaus and Barracuda.
The majority of computer viruses are spread through email, and their effects can be devastating in terms of data breaches and lost hours. Our filter recognises that there is no such thing as a legitimate virus, so emails which contain a known virus are stopped and deleted without exception by default. Advanced users can choose to disable this feature, but we strongly recommend against it. Our virus databases are updated hourly to ensure we offer the maximum protection to our customers.
When the filter identifies a message as junk, it makes a report indicating why the message was targeted as such. This can prove interesting as to why some emails mail have been deemed to be spam in the first place. The report is attached as text file.
To show you how our spam filter has benefited you we provide you with graphical statistics. These are detailed statistics which are provided on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. They include not just a graph shown details of the filtering, but which checks caught the highest amount of spam borne email (eg block list checks, caught x number of emails to your domain).
| Option | Subscription (exc. VAT) |
|---|---|
| Annual Subscription [per domain name] | £45 |
By default all customers will be placed on a 14 day free trial of our External Spam and Virus Filter allowing you to evaluate its effectiveness before committing. To place an order please follow one of these two steps:
You can place an order for our External Spam Filter online via our site. We aim to process all orders within 4 working hours. Once setup you simply need to login to our control panel, add the recipients you want mail scanned for, and then simply point the MX records across to us. There should be no downtime or disruption.
The External Spam Filter can be purchased online through your master control panel. Hover over 'My Accounts', select 'Purchase Account' and the Spam Filter will be an option to purchase, setup instantly for you to use. If you have difficulties logging into your control panel or unsure how to proceed please contact us.
