The first thing that the mail server does when a message arrives is check to make sure that a user is actually on the server to receive that message. If the user does not exist it immediately rejects the message and sends it back to the person that sent it.

How many times have you received an email to sjflskejesk@yourdomain.com and think how can I stop that from getting to me? This is a common technique for spammers and one that can be easily stopped on your account if you use a simple but relatively unused procedure.

:fail:

:fail: is a simple yet powerful tool that everyone should use on their account. :fail: should be used as your default address and is currently used here at Simply Hosting on all new account setups. When you have your default address set to your default email address all email will be delivered and you will potentially receive a lot of email sent by spammers that you never wanted.

What does :fail: do. If :fail: is set as your default address and a message arrives to an email that does not exist it rejects the message. It is actually very simple in its usage and easy to setup and should be the first thing to check on your account.

If you are worried about not receiving email to certain email addresses like abuse@ or postmaster@ (which are technically required to be set on every domain) then setup a forward that has abuse@ and postmaster@ forward to an email address of your choice. As long as the email has somewhere to go (either to a setup email box or a forward) it will not be rejected and sent back from whence it came.

How do I accomplish this you ask? View Flash Tutorial

Gustave Dahl

As our old and new customers alike already know we utilize MailScanner for server side and user side SPAM control. MailScanner provides us with the best ability to have full control over what email we want to receive and what we do not want to receive.

The amount of SPAM has increased dramatically. In order to give you some insight as to how much our two main shared servers were processing on average 25000 emails a day through MailScanner. If this is not an alarming number in itself here are a few more statistics.

Out of the 25000 emails that were processed MailScanner was marking approximately 5000 as "clean" and the rest were being marked as SPAM.
There are a few bad things about this.

1. The first being SPAM that you may end up receiving.

If you have chosen to receive all the email that MailScanner marks as SPAM you are receiving a large number of emails that you do not want. (Although you do have that option to delete those before you get them through your MailScanner control panel)

2. Server Processing Used

The server utilizes a certain amount of processing power for each email that is scanned. If we can cut that number down server performance will increase as a result.

With all of this in mind we recently took the following action to reduce the amount of unwanted email traveling through our systems.

We are allowing our first stop in email processing (Exim our email server) to check to see if the sender is in a few select RBL (Real-time Blackhole List). Previously MailScanner was also checking RBL's and marking them immediately as SPAM. By having exim check before MailScanner we can solve both of the issues above. Exim immediately rejects the email before it is allowed to go any further. This is email you did not want in the first place.

This has subsequently reduced the amount of emails processed in any give day to around 12000 which is a significant drop. So out of the 25000 that were being processed roughly half were coming from known spam sources.

We believe this is the best route to go not only for minimizing the SPAM that even makes it to the end user but also to limit the resource usage on our servers.

Gustave Dahl

We are pleased to announce that our third shared server was brought online.

alabama.shnw.net

This is an important step in our rapid growth over the last year. Simply Hosting has grown by over 100% in the last year alone and we hope this is just the beginning.

Our thanks goes out to all of our clients.

Gustave Dahl

The server upgrades that were performed early Wednesday morning were completed and everything is running smoothly.

There were a few other things done during this time that will allow our server administrators to resolve problems faster when they arise.

This will provide a stable system for you to host your websites.