as of 10:00 am this morning, all of our clients have recieved a new incoming mail filter that will stop messages with the following subject lines:

If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you

But make allowance for their doubting too

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting

Or, being lied about

Or, being hated

And yet don't look too good

the long-awaited film version of the Broadway hit

For further assistance, please contact!

If such a message is recieved, then it will not be delivered to the client's Inbox - instead it will go to the subfolder "SPAM". This will be visible ONLY in webmail; it won't show up in Outlook. The addition of this filter will NOT affect any existing filters that the client may have had previously. If a client discovers that the filter is blocking a legitimate message, we can remove it easily for them.

Norton/Symantec write up can be found here: http://securityresponse.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/w32.lovgate.r@mm.html

Hi,

Why, suddenly, is hostmysite.com taking in interest in setting up filters for their client's email servers? It took a very long time for you to implement a spam blocking feature. ("NoSpamWeb" with the filter x-imail-spam-dnsbl doesn't work for my domain but that's another topic.). And as far as I can tell you don't feature a system wide email virus detection program.

So, what has changed at hostmysite? And how did you come by the decision to implement this system wide filter?

Regards,
cah

The short answer: In the past it wasn't feasible given our network structure.

The long answer: Our incoming mail is directed to a specific mailserver, i.e. 'mailXX.safesecureweb.com', where XX is a number between 1 and 25. Since it's on 25 servers, any rule that is to be set across all incoming mail accounts would have to be enabled on all 25 of them. Additionally, Imail Server (our vendor email software) doesn't have any method for installing a global filter, so we had to install it in each separate domain's filter rules. That's over 25,000 domain filters. So, in and of itself, that's a fairly big task.

Other issues to consider:

1. If the filters aren't setup correctly, valid email could be stopped.
2. Since it's not feasible to get all of our client's permission before we install the filters, we're setting ourselves for a fall if there IS a problem since we're 100% responsible.

#1 and #2 combined are a serious issue - we attempted something similar to this several months ago and it had unexpected results, which ultimately caused some client emails to be tagged as spam/virus when they weren't.

Now, for virus filtering on incoming messages, the mailservers in question (1 - 25) are running Norton AntiVirus in order to prevent viral infection. However, they cannot quarantine viruses arriving within our client's inbox because to do so would prevent access to the entire inbox (which is stored as a single file). This leaves our AntiVirus options sorely lacking, I know, which is something we're also currently addressing.

And how are we doing this? We've just implemented two external email relay servers which are responsible for sending all of our outbound mail. Both are Linux OS running PostFix, and both actively scan all email for viruses, and deletes those that they find. This is a recent development (less than 1 week) and as soon as we work out any kinks it will be deployed in an incoming environment as well.

So, what changed at HostMySite? I'd like to say it was my work as an Email administrator, however it would probably be closer to the truth to say that nothing changed - we've always worked to making a better hosting environment for our clients, and this is just another way in which we're improving every day!

Hi Jamie,

Thanks for your reply.

Hostmysite.com has done an outstanding job in operating and supporting web servers. But email service has been another story.

Many of my clients are small business that are now requiring more web server options than their local ISPs can or will provide. But the local ISPs do a good job (not perfect of course) with spam and virus filtering. But I can't recommend hostmysite.com if switching is going to greatly up the amount of spam and virus exposure to their email account users. Why would I want to do that?

And until recently, the support documentation on the website concerning setting up email filters was poor. Support would reference the iMail server manual which was difficult to use since it was written with the idea that the user was an administrator and had permissions to access iMail server files that I do not have. For example, the iMail users manual had examples of filters that an administrator could copy/paste to the correct file -- while I would have to go through the filter form set up using the web interface -- this difference made the process much harder to learn than it should have been. And frustrating as well.

Regards,
cah

This is something that we're actually addressing right now. As I mentioned in my previous post, we recently began virus and spam filtering of outbound mail, and as soon as that system has 'settled in', we'll begin doing the same with inbound mail, so your clients won't have to setup any custom filters themselves.



I will look into this, and see if I can get the current documentation revised to reflect the fact that you'd be using the web interface. Thanks for your suggestions!

Cah, can you let me know what your domain is? If so, I can take a look at your filters and see if I can improve upon them, or possibly give you an idea of how much spam is being filtered from your email. If you don't want to post it here, you can email it to me ~ jamie@hostmysite.com. Thanks!