Email Hosting Question

[ari]

Hi, my current web and email hosting client has informed me that when it comes to email spam it is illegal for an ISP to delete email that their anti spam filters mark as spam. Is this true?

I receive on average 60 emails a day that my ISP server marks as spam and I need to manually either use a program like Mailwasher to delete them off the server before downloading them, or allow Outlook to place them in the Junkmail folder once downloaded.

As I check email during the day on my cellphone I find it very frustrating that i'm wasting my time scrolling through the spam just to pickout the legit emails.

I know Mweb remove any emails marked as spam, but if it's illegal then why they not just marking the emails as spam and leaving it up to their clients to place filters on their side?

 

[bwana]

Not sure about the legality of it but realistically they should be letting individuals decide what they want done with it.

I can understand their concern - spam is a huge burden on resources.

You could always filter your email through something like gmail - their spam filters are pretty good.

 

[ari]

Thanks, so if I understand you correctly, you suggesting for my ISP to forward all emails to my gmail account and then for me to setup Outlook to check my gmail account?

 

[noswal]

Its easy enough to do, I have several domains that route mail or alerts to gmail, I dont need to forward it on but I could if needed.

Next you'll be asking about a gmail account - you need to request an invite.

 

[Syndyre]

Gmail should work pretty well, your spam's only deleted after 30 days or something but it doesn't go into your inbox so you don't see it when you download or check your mail.

 

[bullfrog]

I believe that it could be illegal for an ISP to filter out and delete the clients spam email as those filters are not always 100% correct and could filter out non spam emails too. I'm sure that no-one would be happy if they don't recieve some important email because mweb thought it was spam. So it could definately be illeagal if they do it by default with no way of disabling the spam filters.

What I do on my server is filter out all spam email and send it to another email account with all the spam. This way I don't lose important emails if they were wrongfully marked as spam and can go through them all. But then again I have full control over my server and can customise as much as I want.

So if your host has some control panel type thing then it might be possible to add a rule to forward all emails marked as spam to a seperate email account. If not then you could easily forward all emails to a gmail account as they have very good spam filters.

If you don't have a gmail account but want one just pm me your email address and I'll send you an invite

 

[Carlhead]

You can use GMAIL as your email host for your domain... i.e. you don't need to setup forwarders on your ISP's side.

You simply setup a gmail email domain account and have your ISP point your domains MX records to the gmail mail servers.

Then you log into your gmail domain account and create your email addresses right there.

Oh and according to the telecoms act, it's illegal for anyone to interferre with the transmission of electronic messages (like email), so your ISP is not allowed to stop the delivery of mails to your mail address with out your consent.

 

[ari]

Thanks for all the feedback. I already have a gmail account so i'll give it a go with forwarding. As for the control panel. My ISP has two options for hosting, if I host internationally I get a C-Panel but if I go Local then there's no panel as he says it compromises his servers.

 

[bullfrog]

Cpanel is very good and it's what i use on my server. If enabled you can access all the filtering and other spam and email controls. If you know how to set it up you work out quite a nice system for spam filtering.

You can even set up a point system where if an email has a certain amount of "spam points" then it's filtered as spam. This way you can filter out all spam emails but risk filtering out other emails too or set the points a bit higher and filter out most spam emails and none of the other emails. It gives points according to certain criteria, like too many capitals used, certain words used too much and also checks the ip's that the emails were sent from. I set mine up in such a way that it filters very strictly and then forwards all the spam to an email address that I check every now and then to make sure none of my important emails were sent there.

If you have cpanel and want to set up something similar, pm me and I will help out

 

[ari]

Thanks for the assistance bullfrog. For me to get CPanel i'd have to change my hosting to international which i'm not that keen to do. Is your hosting that you offer local or international?

 

[Carlhead]

Thanks for all the feedback. I already have a gmail account so i'll give it a go with forwarding. As for the control panel. My ISP has two options for hosting, if I host internationally I get a C-Panel but if I go Local then there's no panel as he says it compromises his servers.

Load of nonsence... he prolly doen't want to pay the licensing fees.

Maybe consider a better web host... and also Plesk if better than cPanel, we've recently moved to Plesk from cPanel and I'm VERY impressed.

 

[bullfrog]

Thanks for the assistance bullfrog. For me to get CPanel i'd have to change my hosting to international which i'm not that keen to do. Is your hosting that you offer local or international?

It's international only for the time being. Local is just not a viable option at the current cost etc. Check out the link in my sig for prices if you're considering it