Email Upgrades

Our email system has always been a cut above the rest – but there’s always room for improvement.  Throughout September we’ve been improving two key aspects of our email system.  These email upgrades have now been rolled out to all users.

Spam Filtering

Following testing across thousands of emails, first on our own server then on a selection of customer servers, we’ve added 2 additional RBL checks for incoming mail.  RBL checks allow us to check if a mail server connecting to us is often a source of spam.  Where it is, the mail is blocked and a message sent to the sender to advise them.  We choose our RBLs very carefully – we don’t want false positives but also don’t want to contribute to essentially ransomware lists where innocent users are forced to pay for renewal.  These new RBLs are already catching spam that our previous ones missed.

Additionally, we’ve enabled a feature called ‘Greylisting’.  This works by initially rejecting mail where we’ve never seen the sending server before, telling them to try again shortly.  All legitimate mail servers respond to this and re-try the delivery again – whereas many spam scripts simply move onto the next address.  We automatically exclude all major mail services from this check, as well as any email with valid SPF records (we automatically set these for all of our customers).  If you prefer not to use this feature (as it can cause a short delay when you first receive mail from a new source), you can disable it in your control panel.

Outgoing Mail Delivery

We’ve been using a distributed outgoing mail system for some time, and this has proved extremely successful.  Where black lists and spam filtering were once quite common, they have now been all but eliminated.  Originally this system used 3 hosts over 3 networks.  We’ve now extended this to hundreds of IP addresses over multiple networks to make sure it is even more reliable, and successful, than ever.  What’s more, where we still can’t deliver your email it now forwards to MailChannels – a premium service dedicated to getting your email into inboxes.

In the rare event that this system detects your outgoing email as spam, it will send you a message back to the sender address.  You just need to click the link to verify that your mail isn’t spam and is safe to send.

Continual Improvement

We hope you find these email upgrades beneficial.  We are continuing to improve our services and welcome suggestions.