Things that can go wrong

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Normally this just works and everything is happy. It takes several hours for the mew MX information to propagate and quickly the spam dies down to a small trickle. That's what's supposed to happen but sometimes things don't work that way. So here are some things that might happen and what to do about it.
Normally this just works and everything is happy. It takes several hours for the mew MX information to propagate and quickly the spam dies down to a small trickle. That's what's supposed to happen but sometimes things don't work that way. So here are some things that might happen and what to do about it.
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# One problem that can arise has to do with the configuration of your server that is receiving email from our servers. Your server can start rejecting email that our servers are sending. Why would this happen? Some system are set up so that they have to be the lowest MX record. if they aren't the lowest MX record then they want to forward the email back to our servers and will generally reject email saying that my servers are not allowed to relay mail. And all the email for your domain will start bouncing.
# One problem that can arise has to do with the configuration of your server that is receiving email from our servers. Your server can start rejecting email that our servers are sending. Why would this happen? Some system are set up so that they have to be the lowest MX record. if they aren't the lowest MX record then they want to forward the email back to our servers and will generally reject email saying that my servers are not allowed to relay mail. And all the email for your domain will start bouncing.
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# Because all the email for your domain starts coming from one source your server's anti-spam software will start getting suspicious because of the volume of email coming from us and decide that we are spammers. They might not reject the messages but slow them down through rate limiting which would cause some of your email to be delayed for hours.
# Because all the email for your domain starts coming from one source your server's anti-spam software will start getting suspicious because of the volume of email coming from us and decide that we are spammers. They might not reject the messages but slow them down through rate limiting which would cause some of your email to be delayed for hours.
# Since no spam filter is 100% accurate some spam will get through our filters. Because the spam appears to come from us your server might think we are a spam source and blacklist our servers and start rejecting your email. Sometimes we get listed on spam blocking lists and your hosting company might start blocking based on that list.
# Since no spam filter is 100% accurate some spam will get through our filters. Because the spam appears to come from us your server might think we are a spam source and blacklist our servers and start rejecting your email. Sometimes we get listed on spam blocking lists and your hosting company might start blocking based on that list.

Revision as of 01:43, 1 January 2007

Things that can go wrong during Spam Filter Activation

The spam filtering system is pretty simple in design. Normally email goes directly to your email server. To use our filters what you do is tell the world that our servers are the servers that receive email for your domain. This is done through DNS (Domain Name Services). DNS has a record called the MX (Mail eXchange) records to tell the world where the email goes.

When email arrives at our servers we process it and send it on to your server. We have a routing table that we set up when we create your account. We read your current MX record and stor it in our table, something like this.

domain.com: mail.domain.com

Normally this just works and everything is happy. It takes several hours for the mew MX information to propagate and quickly the spam dies down to a small trickle. That's what's supposed to happen but sometimes things don't work that way. So here are some things that might happen and what to do about it.

  1. One problem that can arise has to do with the configuration of your server that is receiving email from our servers. Your server can start rejecting email that our servers are sending. Why would this happen? Some system are set up so that they have to be the lowest MX record. if they aren't the lowest MX record then they want to forward the email back to our servers and will generally reject email saying that my servers are not allowed to relay mail. And all the email for your domain will start bouncing.
  2. Because all the email for your domain starts coming from one source your server's anti-spam software will start getting suspicious because of the volume of email coming from us and decide that we are spammers. They might not reject the messages but slow them down through rate limiting which would cause some of your email to be delayed for hours.
  1. Since no spam filter is 100% accurate some spam will get through our filters. Because the spam appears to come from us your server might think we are a spam source and blacklist our servers and start rejecting your email. Sometimes we get listed on spam blocking lists and your hosting company might start blocking based on that list.
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