ColoServe MailFilter FAQ
Frequently Asked Questions about ColoServe MailFilter
Q. What is ColoServe MailFilter?
A. ColoServe MailFilter is a network-based content filter designed to help businesses and other domain administrators deal with the growing problem of spam and viruses. ColoServe MailFilter will clean your Email of spam and viruses BEFORE they get to your network and before mail is downloaded to your inbox.
Q. How does it work?
A. ColoServe MailFilter works by intercepting unfiltered Internet Email via SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol), passing Email through a number of tests to determine whether the message is spam or a virus, and then delivering filtered, spam-free and virus-free Email via SMTP to a recipient mail server. Identified spam can either be delivered to the recipient mail server for further processing or they can be quarantined.
Q. Do I need to install anything?
A. No. There is nothing to install. All it takes is a simple DNS MX record change.
Q. How accurate is it?
A. Depending on the type of spam you get, tests indicate that ColoServe MailFilter correctly identifies over 98% of all spam and 99% of all viruses. As the system learns (automatically) the type of valid Emails and spam you normally receive, this accuracy improves over time.
Q. Which mail servers do you support?
A. All mail servers. Because the entire transaction is done via SMTP, which all mail servers must support to send/receive Internet Email, ColoServe MailFilter supports all commercial and non-commercial mail server software and does not require any end-user or mail server configuration.
Q. How do I change my MX record?
A. This will depend on who manages your DNS. Typically, the entity that manages or hosts your Email server will have control of your DNS records. This may be a web hosting provider or your IT person. Many web hosting companies provide a web interface for managing DNS records. Others will change this information on your behalf. Also, some domain name registrars, including GoDaddy and Verisign, provide DNS management services.
Q. What do I change my DNS MX record to?
A. Upon service activation, you will be given a set of filtering servers to use for your DNS MX records. For example, you may be assigned the following servers:
Primary: filter1.servepath.com
Secondary: filter2.servepath.com
Tertiary: filter3.servepath.com
Then, your MX record should look something like:
domain.com. IN MX 10 filter1.servepath.com
domain.com. IN MX 20 filter2.servepath.com
domain.com. IN MX 30 filter3.servepath.com
Q. I am afraid of false positives. Will I lose any Email?
A. ColoServe MailFilter has been designed to minimize the risk of false positives. False positives happen when good messages are incorrectly identified as spam. We take false positives very seriously. As such, the incidence of false positives is extremely low. Any message that is incorrectly identified as spam can be whitelisted to ensure future delivery.
Q. Where does the spam go?
A. Spam can either be quarantined into a central quarantine account, i.e. spam-quarantine@yourdomain.com, or it can be tagged for further processing at the receiving mail server. All spam messages are tagged with a special header indicating that the message is spam. This header is only visible by looking at the source code of the message. This tagging allows the mail administrator on the receiving end to setup custom server-side rules to process this spam. For example, some administrators may want to provide their users with Bulk or Junk Mail folders so that users can check for false positives themselves. For those who don't have filtering options on the server, spam can also be filtered on the mail client. Most Email clients including Outlook, Mozilla and Mac OS X Mail provide client-side filtering rules that can automatically move messages to a Junk Mail folder by looking for the presence of the spam header.
Q. What is the spam header to filter on?
A. Messages identified as spam will have the following header:
X-Spam-Flag: YES
Q. Where do viruses go?
A. Since viruses are extremely harmful and costly to businesses and end-users, identified viruses are deleted upon receipt. Virus quarantine accounts are available for an extra fee.
Q. What is whitelisting and how do I do it?
A. Whitelisting allows you to exclude certain Email addresses from filtering in the event of false positives. Generally, whitelisting is not required since ColoServe MailFilter is extremely accurate in identifying spam and viruses. If you do need to whitelist an address, simply forward a copy of the Email that was incorrectly identified as spam to an Email address that will be provided to you.
Q. Do you support blacklists?
A. Blacklists are the opposite of whitelists. They allow you to automatically identify messages from certain senders as spam. We do not use blacklists because they do not work in today's spam environment. Almost all the spam you get will be sent from random Email addresses that change with every spam you get. Consequently, user-maintained blacklists end up being a lot of work for end-users with very little benefit. ColoServe MailFilter filtering works without the need to maintain blacklists.
Q. How fast is the filtering? Will there be a delay in mail delivery?
A. The filtering happens real-time and takes only milliseconds. All Emails will still be delivered instantly to the receiving mail server.
Q. How often is your service updated for new spam and viruses?
A. Virus definitions are updated every hour. You do not need to do anything to benefit from these updates. For spam, in addition to various local tests, we also consult a number of third-party resources to help identify spam messages. These spam identification sources are updated constantly by thousands of individuals on the Internet. With ColoServe MailFilter, you will always have the latest updates for both spam and viruses.
Q. What should I do if spam comes into my inbox?
A. Please forward any spam that escapes our filters to the email address that we provide when you sign up. Spam messages must be forwarded as attachment in order to be processed by our spam reporting system. Any spam messages forwarded to this address will automatically be reported to a number of third-party spam databases and our bayes databases will "learn" the spam message. This increases the chance that the spam message will be caught the next time around.
Q. If I forward a message to the ColoServe MailFilter, won't my own Email address be added to your spam databases?
A. No, because we only process the attached message. Messages that are not forwarded as attachments are ignored.
Q. I'm still getting spam in my inbox despite forwarding it to you. What's wrong?
A. Spammers do not always follow standard Internet protocols when sending spam. As such, even after changing your MX record, some spammers will continue to send spam directly to your mail server (via your mail server's hostname or IP address), thereby bypassing the filter. They will essentially be using your old MX record even though that information is no longer valid. This behavior should subside over time as spammer software is updated and/or purged. If you are impatient, there are a couple of ways to combat this:
a) Change your mail server's hostname and/or IP address
b) Lock down your mail server to only accept mail from our filtering servers
You can check whether a message has been filtered by looking at the full headers of the Email. All filtered messages will contain the header:
X-Virus-Scanned: by servepath.com
Q. What happens if my mail server goes down?
A. If your mail server goes down, we will queue all mail on our filtering servers so that your Emails are safe. Once your mail server comes back online, all queued mails will be delivered promptly.
Q. What happens if your filtering servers go down?
A. ColoServe MailFilter has been architected for maximum availability and redundancy. We have multiple, load-balanced filtering servers so that if one server should go down, another server is immediately available to continue filtering. We also provide backup mail relays on distinct networks, providing a truly redundant and fault-tolerant service. It is virtually impossible to lose mail using our system.
Q. Is your service secure?
A. We support SSL/TLS encrypted SMTP deliveries on each of our filtering servers. As such, if your mail server supports SSL/TLS encryption, the entire SMTP transaction between the filtering server and your mail server will be secure from eavesdropping.
Q. I'm concerned about privacy. Can you read my Email?
A. We do not store any Email on our filtering servers so we do not have access to the contents of your Emails. Also, ColoServe's privacy policy ensures that a customer's data is always theirs and will never be subject to review by any third-parties without the customer's explicit permission. We do log certain SMTP transaction information to help troubleshoot problems in mail delivery should they arise but this information is only kept for 7 days and we do not archive this information.