Stronger Email Filtering with SpamExperts Print

When the built-in filter isn't enough

Our servers filter spam with SpamAssassin at no charge, tagging suspected spam so nothing is silently lost, as our article on how spam filtering works explains. For most people that is enough. But some businesses need more: a heavier spam load, a need to protect their sending reputation, or a legal requirement to keep every email. For them, we offer SpamExperts, a professional email filtering service, as a paid add-on.

This article explains what it does and who it is for, so you can judge whether it is worth it for you. Current pricing is on our SpamExperts page, this article stays with what it does rather than what it costs.

What makes it stronger than the built-in filter

• A higher catch rate. SpamExperts processes millions of messages daily across its network and learns from all of them, achieving close to 100% accuracy. It simply catches more than a server-level filter can.
• Everything managed from one control panel. Rather than per-mailbox settings scattered around cPanel, SpamExperts gives you a single control panel for the whole domain: your quarantine, your whitelist, and your blacklist all in one place, so you manage spam for your entire business from one screen.
• It is domain-based, not mailbox-based. It protects every address on your domain at once, including forwarders and addresses that are not full mailboxes, which the built-in per-mailbox filtering does not reach in the same way.
• Quarantine instead of guesswork. Suspected spam goes to a quarantine you can review, rather than relying on subject tags and your own filters. Nothing is lost, and checking what was caught is one screen away.

Three parts, chosen to fit

SpamExperts is not one product but three, which can be taken together or separately depending on what you need:

Incoming filtering

The core service: it filters all inbound mail and blocks spam and viruses before they reach your server. It has a genuine bonus most people do not expect, email continuity. If your mail server is ever unreachable, incoming mail is queued rather than bounced, and you can read and reply to it through the SpamExperts web interface in the meantime. So it is not only a spam filter, it is a safety net that keeps your email working during an outage.

Outgoing filtering

This protects your reputation rather than your inbox. It scans mail leaving your domain and stops spam or viruses going out, which matters more than it sounds: if a device or account on your network is ever compromised and starts sending spam without your knowledge, outgoing filtering catches it before your domain and server IP get blacklisted. It is insurance against the blacklisting problem our article on RBL blacklists describes, keeping your outgoing mail trusted and delivered.

Email archiving

Archiving preserves a secure, compressed, encrypted copy of every message in and out of your domain, and it includes both incoming and outgoing filtering as part of it. It exists for two reasons: never losing an email again, recovering something deleted years ago, and legal compliance, which in some industries is a genuine requirement to retain all correspondence. It ships with 10GB of compressed storage by default, extendable in further increments, and given how much mail compresses, that holds a great deal. If you have ever needed to produce an email from three years ago for an audit or a dispute, this is the service that makes that possible.

Who each part is for

• A heavy spam problem the built-in filter is not keeping up with: incoming filtering.
• A business that cannot afford email downtime: incoming filtering, for the continuity queue alone.
• Anyone who sends a lot of mail, or has been blacklisted before: outgoing filtering, to protect your reputation.
• A business with legal retention requirements, or that simply never wants to lose an email: archiving.

Good to know

SpamExperts is a professional tool for businesses whose email matters enough to invest in it, and the honest test is whether the built-in filtering is genuinely falling short for you. If your spam is under control with the free filter, you do not need this, and we will say so. But if spam is costing you time, if downtime would cost you money, or if compliance requires you to keep everything, this is the step up, and each part can be added on its own. If you are weighing it up, talk to us and we will help you work out which parts, if any, are actually worth it for your situation, rather than selling you all three by default.