Jason Salas' WebLog

ORCSWeb freakin' rules: ASP.NET host implements spam filter

I've been with ORCSWeb for more than a year now, after having more my site over from Interland, and I've never looked back.  I liken it (no offense) to being in an abusive relationship and then finding your debutante.  The only minor criticism I've had is the server-provoded POP3 mail service wasn't spam-filtered, which made for some rather uncomfortable downloads, and forced me to buy spam-blocking tools, which I'd have to install on all my LAN's machines.

I had been meaning to e-mail Scott Forsyth for the past couple of weeks to inquire about the possibility of getting such anti-spam tools installed on the server, but never got around to it until yesterday, to which he teased, "Ask me tomorrow".  Not being clairvoyant but definetly picking up on his point, I was happy to get the announcement just now that ORCSWeb is going to be taking measure to reduce junk mail.  Yeah!

Dear Client,

The volume of spam has been increasing rapidly, and is a major concern today.  We have investigated a number of spam solutions and are now ready to provide spam filtering service, based on the Barracuda Spam Firewall.  Our internal testing and trial of this product was very successful; we're excited to offer this service enhancement to you at no additional charge. We expect that this product will be a great solution for you and your users.

We will be implementing the new spam filtering over the next 3 weeks.  This solution offers you a great deal of flexibility in managing the impact of spam.  Spam filtering can be enabled or disabled domain by domain, based on your preference.  And if filtering is enabled for your domain, each user can also decide to enable spam filtering or not.  Users can also adjust the filtering to their specific filtering preferences.

We have configured the Spam Firewall with very safe conservative settings; a few spam messages may get delivered, but legitimate messages should not be lost.  However, you can adjust these settings to better meet your needs.  A key feature of the spam filtering is the creation of a Quarantine account on the spam firewall that holds messages that are very likely to be spam.  This
approach keeps most spam clutter out of your inbox.  There is a description of this new spam filtering process and related FAQs at these URLs: http://www.orcsweb.com/barracuda_overview.aspx
http://www.orcsweb.com/spam_faq.aspx.

Spam filtering will be implemented in phases over the next 3 weeks, based on the primary email domains hosted on our mail server.  A group of domains will be implemented every few days.  If you have multiple domain names set up as Host Aliases on the mail server, the Host Alias accounts will be done at the same time as the primary account.