Yes, that’s true. It’s not an exaggerated headline to get more attention. On average, 60% of the email that is sent to the domains we look after is unwanted, unsafe and sometimes plain dangerous. Fear not though, if you are using any of our advanced email packages, you’re safe.

This morning I was running some through reports to see how our email systems were performing and I was staggered to see the volumes of email that were being received, but more noticeably the percentage of that which is being blocked. We look after a number of email domains for our clients ranging from single person organisations up to twenty  or more people (we’re capable of handling much larger if needed!), and as part of that service we also offer an advanced spam filter.

This filter looks at the header of each received email for warning signs of spam and compares it to many of the well known email blacklists (several organisations monitor for computers that are known to be sending spam emails and list them for people to check against). It also runs through two different virus scanning systems before deciding whether to allow the email to pass through to the expected recipient. This is all done in milliseconds, therefore no delay is noticeable.

At the end of each day, every subscriber gets a report showing all the emails that have not been passed (called a quarantine report) which allows them to ‘release’ any held up email or whitelist a sender that will prevent future emails being quarantined from that sender. It won’t show every mail, just the questionable ones – if it’s a cast iron certainty that the mail is spam, you’ll never see it or even know […]