Web Hosting FAQs

Unsolicited commercial email (also known as Spam or Junk Email) is any email you receive that was sent to you without your consent. It is becoming a serious problem with many Internet Service Providers reporting that most of the email they handle is now Spam.

Once the culprits have your email address you will start to receive all manner of bogus messages and the longer you've had your address for, the worse it will get.

The content of Spam is varied but companies trying to sell Viagra, pornographic material or cure-all wonder drugs is a consistent theme. We recently received an email trying to sell us some pills that claim to make you lose weight, improve your libido, enhance intelligence and prevent hair loss!

Symantec (the makers of Norton AntiVirus) claim that 80% of children aged 7 - 18 receive inappropriate SPAM every day. 47% have received pornographic emails (source .net magazine).

Thankfully there is something we can do to help you deal with this menace. Spam filtering is provided as standard with every hosting package and works like this:

1. All email destined for your inbox is scanned for potential Spam.
2. Any email identified as SPAM has any potentially harmful code or attachments removed.
3. The email is still delivered to your inbox but with additional text in the subject "*****SPAM*****" which you can instruct your email program to look out for. Alternatively you can log into your Control Panel and tell your spam filter to just delete these messages automatically.
4. You can then set up filters in your email program to deal with the Spam as you wish e.g. to automatically move Spam to a separate inbox folder (if you setup automatic deletetion you do so at the risj, albeit quite small, of losing some legitimate emails). This means you can quickly scan through it for legitimate emails before deleting it all, whilst keeping your normal inbox free of junk.

Related topics: Spam SpamAssassin Anti Virus Email