Frequently Asked Questions
About Our Service
Are We For You?
About Our Service
How does your service work?
Our service is conceptually very simple to understand:
- All mail destined to your domain is delivered to our servers, instead of to yours.
- We filter it, and reject the SPAM, virus, and junk mail.
- All the remaing email is delivered to your mailserver.
The mail which our service rejects is available for display in your quarantine area - so you have complete peace of mind.
How do I start using your service?
You can start using our service at anytime of the day or night, following the instructions in our quickstart guide.
What checks can you perform?
Right now we perform the following checks:
- Ensuring the connecting server has a reverse DNS record.
- Ensuring that sending servers correctly identify themselves.
- Optionally we may:
- We apply an SPF test against all incoming mails.
More tests, including custom ones, will be added over time.
Which headers do you add to mail?
Most of the tests which are performed will result in some new headers being added to mail. However we skip running our tests as soon as we identify a message as spam, and that means that all headers are not added to all mails.
There is a full list of potential headers we add which you can consult, along with their meanings.
Can you add custom checks for us?
Yes. We can add custom checks for you very easily.
For example if you never want to reject a mail containing the term "keepme" in the subject we can ensure that happens - regardless of whether it would otherwise be rejected.
Similarly we can prevent you from receiving messages from a particular host, sender, or with a certain subject pattern.
Let us know what you'd like and we can typically setup a custom test in less than a day!
Are We For You?
What volume of mail can you carry?
If you receive anywhere between 1 and 100,000 messages a day then we certainly are suitable for you. (That is counting both legitimate and spam mails!)
If you're receiving a regular volume of more than 100,000 messages on a daily basis then we're currently unable to accept you as a user.
What level of redundancy do you offer?
Our mail-scanning is carried out exclusively upon machines with redundant disks.
In terms of handling capacity of incoming messages our setup should scale to handling a volume of around 500,000 messages a day without any problems. This is achieved partially through pro-active maintainance and tweaking, and partially through having multiple MX machines.
How long will you hold messages for?
When we receive mail for your domain we'll process it, and then forward it on to your real mailserver if it is found to be clean.
Our mail queue will hold messages, and attempt to deliver them, for up to four days. This means that if your mailserver is offline for less than three consecutive days we'll not have any problem mailing you, and you will not lose mail.
If you have an outage which lasts longer than that please let us know - we can arrange to change the destination for your email, or hold it for longer in our queues.
How can I see status updates?
We keep a blog which is updated every week or two, or whenever we're about to launch something new. You can read the most recent entries and subscribe to it here:
In addition to this any failure of our MX machines will be visible upon the off-site status page:
How quickly can you respond to problems?
It is our aim to respond to problems before you need to report them. In many cases this will be true, but if not you may expect a response to any support request sent during the working day within 60 minutes.
Out of hours any new issue which is reported as a new support ticket will generate an SMS to page somebody who can look it. Out of hours support is expected to be as good as the support received during working hours - but we're still in the process of arranging it.