Mailfoundry Spam Filtering

All of our hosting accounts include spam protection from the Mailfoundry Email Filtering Appliance - this state of the art solution scans all incoming email and removes, or quarantines any spam that it encounters. The benefits of Mailfoundry are several fold

• Spam definitions are updated every five minutes, twenty-four hours a day, every day of the year
• Spam definitions are written by technical staff who constantly review them
• Spam emails are deleted, or quarantined on the Mailfoundry Appliance and do not affect your bandwidth or storage quota
• Suspect emails (those which may be spam, but the status is uncertain) are retained on the appliance for seven days and can be released by simply clicking the link in the daily email digest that you receive
• Malicious emails, including viruses are blocked
• Very low rate (quoted at 1 in 1,000,000) of false positives with a 99% spam removal rate

For more information visit the Mailfoundry Website

Tips and tricks

Virus protection

• Never open an unsolicited email attachment.
• Ensure that you have a virus scanner installed on your computer and that it is set to scan incoming email. Consider a firewall to prevent attempts at hacking. Ensure that you update your virus definitions on a regular basis.
• Ensure that you virus scan all media - CD's, floppy disks and the files on removable memory sticks may be infected (even shrink wrapped disks have been known to harbour a virus!)
• Schedule your virus scanner to scan your whole machine at least once a week. if you know that your virus scanner will update each Wednesday, then set your machine to scan on a Thursday or Friday, after the new virus definitions have been loaded.
• Avoid using the preview pane on Microsoft Outlook Express, especially if this has not been updated to the latest version. Some older versions have been known to run malicious code simply by displaying the message in the preview pane.
• Decide a backup strategy, back-up important files - Documents, emails keep a backup safe off-site.

Spam protection

• Never publish your email address on web pages, message boards, newsgroups, or in chat rooms. If you need to do this, break up the address so that it is not easily readable by machines
• If you post to newgroups, consider an email address that has spam controls such as a Yahoo or Hotmail address.
• Never respond to "Remove Me" instructions, this just confirms that your email address is live.
• Consider using tools such as SpamPal, SpamAssasin, or a mailreader such as Firefox which includes spam filtering.

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Web resources

We have provided a list below of resources that we use regularly to get information on viruses, spam and hoaxes.

Spamcop provide a service for reporting spammers

Spamassassin provide open source spam controls - these are used to filter mail through our servers.

SpamPal provide free spam controls for the windows platform.

Norton virus encyclopaedia - Information on current virus threats and hoaxes.

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Virus Scanners and Firewalls

Symantec - Producers of Norton Antivirus, Firewall, Spam Guard and Internet privacy utilities.

McAfee - Producers of various Internet utilities.

Grisoft - Anti Virus Guard (AVG) is a free virus scanner available from Grisoft.

ZoneAlarm - Produce free and commercial PC firewalls.