Anti-Spam Mechanisms on our Mail Servers Unsolicited Bulk Email ("spam", "junk email") is a significant problem on the Internet. As with many Service Providers, 65%+ of all incoming email to the Emphasys mail servers is spam. This ever-increasing volume of junk email would clog our mail queues and delay email delivery to our customers. To address this problem, Emphasys uses a series of anti-spam mechanisms/filters on our mail servers to identify and eliminate incoming spam. The anti-spam filters outlined below apply to all incoming email for all domains by default. Emphasys customers can request that anti-spam filters be turned OFF for their domain by contacting us. Server-side Spam Prevention Once a message reaches our servers. We run checks to verify the legitimacy of each message. We check the message for key phrases to determine if the message is spam and should be removed. We also use "spam traps" to catch and stop messages which have been sent randomly to popular email names. Using a program called SpamAssassin, we analyze and rank every single email with a numerical score. This score is placed in the header of each email. The higher the score, the more probable that it is spam. If a message scores above a 7.0, we add "X-Spam-Status: YES" to the header. If a message scores above a higher number, we never deliver the email. For an extra fee, we can block or route emails based on the spam score of your choice. Contact us for more info. Many client email programs (Outlook Express, and others) will allow you to filter out email based on the spam score in the header. Blocked IP's DNS-based Block Lists (DNSBLs) Before spam can find its way to our servers, we use blacklists to block email from known spam sources. We don't accept email messages originating from IP's in the following blacklists as well as our own private list of IP's:  spamhaus.org  dsbl.org IP and Domain Blacklists Emphasys refuses emails from IPs in the following countries and networks:  China  Korea  Malaysia  Nigeria  Russia  Singapore  Taiwan  Thailand  Brazil In addition, we have blocked transit from certain specific IP addresses and domain names that have sent large quantities of spam in the past. News 23-Aug 2006 Mail Server Issues The mail server was not consistently sending email from 1pm to 4pm. This has been resolved and all functionality is active including webmail access. We recommend restarting your mail program if you cannot send or receive, as it may have been effected by the mail server outage. If you experience any strange activity, please call us at 972.960.6060. 5-Jan 2009 Barracuda now helping to filter spam We've added the Barracuda RBL as additional spam prevention measure, blocking another 500-1000 messages each hour. 8-Jun 2008 Mail Server Upgrade Sunday, June 8th In an effort to keep up with rising email volume, we'll be upgrading our mail server to a larger system. Mail may be offline intermittently (but briefly) on Sunday. 7-Jul 2005 Mail System Upgrade Our enterprise mail server system components were upgraded on Thu-Jul-7 at 03:25am. Email reception was offline for approximately 15 minutes. More Items copyright © 1995-2009 Emphasys Technologies, Inc. acceptable use policy