Most users do not notice the flood of various email trash. The reason is, that the web hosting providers are taking massive actions against spam to protect their customers from it. Almost 95% of the mail volume is unsolicited email.

Mail statistic

An analysis of the mail traffic at emerion shows only 3% of the mails are delivered as OK, so “not spam”.

2.4 million emails were analyzed during the period of 4 days.

Spam emails sent from botnets (Learn more about what is a botnet: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Botnet ) are growing and spam runs become more aggressive.

Emerion expanded the mail system in addition to the existing actions of spam defense. This causes no more delay in the delivery of messages. For customers, it makes it even easier – the flood of spam is less, also in the junk folder and a free-flowing communication is ensured.

Source: Sophos GmbH

Redirect messages

Email forwarding has pitfalls

Email forwarded to external email accounts outside the emerion system, can cause some problems. There is no guarantee that the target mail server accepts the email, even if the emerion mail server forwards the email reliable. The most common reason, why email is not accepted by the target mail server, is spam.

If messages are redirected to another email provider spam is also forwarded. Due to fight against spam, some providers try to block such server, where to much spam is coming from. And in case of a forward the server which one redirects the messages, looks like the server which one is spamming. emerion has strong anti-spam-policies and tries to avoid outgoing spam, but in case of redirect, our mail systems just forward these messages.

We had long discussions with email providers like GMX, which one blocks a mail server, if there are to much emails to not existing email addresses. They recommend that we have to keep our recipient lists clean. A nice try, but we are running thousands of email addresses and we cannot control where our users send email to.

Sometimes there are also problems with hotmail, yahoo and chello. They decline to accept mail from the emerion forwarding mail server system, due to the reasons mentioned above. But emerion has no possibility to talk to a responsible person at these providers about the problem. So our customers which one are also customers at the other provider, has to call them, to unlock the emerion mail server system. The customer has to talk to the support at the external mail provider, but the nice guy on the telephone may send the customer back to emerion. “This domain name is not hosted with us”, could be the short answer. To avoid the hassle of an unwanted telephone loop, the emerion support prepares his customers to say the right things to resolve the issue as fast as possible.

Solution for pitfalls of forwarded email

Reverse the redirect and let GMX, hotmail, yahoo etc. forward the email to your email account at emerion. Customers can easily retrieve all their emails via our ad-free and comfortable webmail, as well as with every email program. We at emerion we don’t decline mail and we have better methods to filter out spam.

Unsolicited commercials in your inbox

While everybody talks about the financial crises, criminal activity grows on the Internet. So called “black heads” are using the Internet not only to gather private user data, they also build international networks to optimize criminal processes and distribution channels.

Even spammers are using such networks. If an email address is in their list once, that address will be distributed among spammers and the user will get a huge amount of unsolicited emails over time.

The usage of a good spam filter helps you to keep out the litter, and the filter should produce few false positives. You want to get your newsletter that you subscribed to, even if it is spam for another user, right?

emerion offers a highly valuable spam filter in each web hosting plan, the emerion SVX spam- and virus protection, which is customizable for your needs. It is possible to tune the filter on a scale from 1 to 12, and black and white lists are also supported per email address. If an email contains a virus, it will be deleted immediately from the server, emails detected as spam are stored in the spam folder, accessible from your webmail account. The advantage in comparison to local spam and virus protection applications running on your computer, is that the emails need not be downloaded to your computer first. They are caught at the server, so you save valuable time, bandwidth and power of your computer.

With an effective spam filter you avoid the hassles. According to a message of the anti-virus vendor McAffee you even save the environment. They calculated that the electronic distribution, viewing and deleting of spam emails generates as much carbon dioxide as powering 1.9 million houses.

Nobody knows the accuracy of this data and nobody really knows, how much spam is circulating through the Net, but a well tuned spam filter gives you the best you can get: valuable time.