Red Cube Hosting

Since we wrote last week about our updated spam filtering, we have been rejecting more spam than ever. In the last 7 days we have rejected 189,956 junk emails - that’s almost three every second.

Messages that are rejected are ones we know are spam - these fall into three main categories:

• Emails which are malformed or are sent in a way which is non-standards compliant, these are either spam is emails being sent via a broken mail server.
• Mail from computers known to be used by spammers - we use DNSBL’s to find out if the computer sending email through our servers is a known spammer or not.
• Messages which our spam filtering software is very confident are spam, such as those which match a Distributed Checksum Clearinghouse, or have a very high combined score from all the tests we carry out.

Further to this, our software identified 6,611 emails which were likely to be spam but weren’t confident enough about to reject - these are the ones which are arrive with “***SPAM***” in the subject line.

We also identified 302 viruses in emails*; this may seem low - but this is because the majority of viruses were rejected before they got as far as the virus scanner.

Spam and virus filtering statistics for the past week (click to enlarge).

* Please note, although we do check incoming emails for viruses, we strongly advise our customers to run anti-virus on their machines, especially if they run Windows.

We offer two different ways for you to access your email - via POP or IMAP. This article explains how each works, and gives some guidelines as to which is likely to be best for you.

POP (Post Office Protocol v3 or POP3)

POP downloads email from a single folder - your Inbox. When you check your email in your mail program, it downloads the email from the server to your local computer. In most email programs, you can choose to leave the email on the server for a a number of days so you could choose to leave mail on the server for 30 days and then use our webmail to see recent email and new email when you are away from your computer. As email is moved from the hosting servers to your computers each time you check your email, it does’t use up as much of your hosting space.

POP is ideal if:

you read/reply to your email on one computer most of the time.
if you have very high volumes of email (particularly email with attachments).
you use dial up, or a pay-as-you-go internet service provider.
you only want to look new/recent email via webmail.

IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol v4 or IMAP4)

When you access your email using IMAP, it remains stored on the server in multiple folders (including folders you can create yourself, and your sent items). This means that you can connect to the mail server from any computer and see your email in the relevant folders. Most email programs allow you to work “offline” from a local copy of your mailbox so you can still read/reply to email when you are not connected to the internet.

IMAP is ideal if:

you read/reply to your email on several computers (including via webmail).
you use a mobile email device such as a BlackBerry or our webmail service.
you don’t receive a huge volume of email, or many large attachments.
several people share a mailbox (for example a generic “sales@” email address).

As your email is stored on the server, it counts towards the space allowance on your account - if your account becomes full you will need to delete some email, download it to your computer or upgrade your account to give yourself more storage space.

Generally, we advise people to use POP unless there is an overriding need to use IMAP.

One more option… SMTP

Beyond the scope of this article, with mentioning SMTP. If your company has it’s own mail server on it’s network (such as, Microsoft Exchange), we can arrange for email for your domain(s) to be delivered and provide a backup server incase your network or server is unavailable. Please note email delivered by SMTP does not get filtered for viruses/spam on our servers - so you will need to make alternative arrangements.

Information in these guides and articles is provided free of charge and without warranty.