02/04/2020
Spam management service announcement!
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After a recent internal review of our spam management practices, we felt it to be an appropriate time to explain how we manage spam at NobleHost whilst announcing a vital improvement to our service offering.
NobleHost and Spam
We’re very proactive in spam prevention. We’ve been operating a multi layered anti-spam strategy for some time that aims to reduce spam delivered to our customers, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Anti-spam blocklists
NobleHost is subscribed to a number of anti-spam blocklists, whereby problem ‘email servers’ from around the world are added to these blocklists and are only unblocked once they fix their email servers and stop sending out spam! Our blocklists are updated daily and contain anything upward of half a million blocked servers.
Mail Scanning – Spam Score
We operate a mail scanner that checks each and every email that passes through our server. No human intervention is involved during the mail scanning stage, it’s purely an algorithm that checks emails against a pre-determined set of words/phrases etc and each email is given a score or ranking.
The higher the score or ranking, the greater likelihood the email is spam.
You may have noticed some emails received contain ****SPAM**** in the subject line. This occurs when our mail scanner has determined the email has reached an initial score/threshold. Our system then inserts ****SPAM**** into the subject line as a warning to the end user that the message “could” be spam and to proceed with caution.
There is also a secondary score/threshold, if exceeded the email won’t be delivered to you. The email has to have something pretty serious in it to reach the secondary score.
There are other checks that occur during the mail scanning stage, such as virus, hyperlink and attachment checking, however the spam score is the most relevant to identifying and managing spam.
The mail scanner scoring system is fully adjustable down to an account level, and can be tweaked or turned off upon request.
Manual Auditing
Due to the significant volumes of emails that pass through our servers, we conduct random audits of emails that have hit the initial spam score/threshold, or exceed the secondary threshold.
We check;
- to ensure the system is functioning as designed
- to ensure the spam checking algorithm remains relevant, and
- to reduce potential false positives
Furthermore, during the same audit we may identify anything up to 50 high volume spammers and report them for blacklisting and notify their email hosting providers regarding the abuse, wherever possible.
Our continuous improvement endeavours
As you can see from the above, managing spam can be a big job and whilst we feel we have a robust methodology to handle spam, there is always the chance some spam emails may slip through our system undetected into your inbox- and until today we’ve lacked the formal process for our customers to notify us of such occurrences.
So, we’re pleased to announce we’re closing this vital gap in our customer service offering!
All NobleHost customers who have their email hosted with us are welcome to forward undetected spam to [email protected] for review. We will then utilise our processes to improve our mail scanning algorithm and block/report spam sources with the aim of reducing the amount of spam reaching your inbox.
For this to succeed, we kindly request you only forward spam-
that is less than 24 hours old;
that has arrived undetected (ie. ****SPAM**** is missing from the subject line)
that was received by an email account hosted with us; and
to our spam support email address: [email protected]
There’s no obligation to partake in this exercise, we’re simply offering this as an option to our customers who are receiving undetected spam and would like our help in reducing it.
We unfortunately can’t help with email accounts hosted elsewhere, even if your website is hosted with us- but feel free to touch base if you want our help bringing your email into our system.
If you have staff that have email accounts hosted with us, they too can forward undetected spam they have received to [email protected] for review, as needed.
There’s no additional charge for utilising this service, it’s all included in your existing hosting fee with us.
Finally, feel free to call or email if you have any questions. We can’t thank you enough for your support and we sincerely appreciate you choosing NobleHost for your website and email hosting requirements!
