We have noticed a few people turning off their spamassassin and get thousands of spam resulting in clogging of their email boxes. This causes them to lose their important business mail and also puts a heavy toll on the server which keeps on trying to deliver these mails to the user mailboxes.

We have made “having spamassassin on” compulsory on all the domains with immediate effect. While you have the full authority to manage the spamassassin settings through your control panel, you cannot turn it off. This is required to keep the sanity of the server intact.

You see the spammers employ robots (automated software) to scan the web sites on the Internet and locate the email addresses that they can use to send unsolicited offers to people. If you publish your email address openly on your site, this address is going to be harvested for sure and then you can look forward to more spam that you can imagine.

What’s the way out? You can publish your address like info AT domain DOT com and put a note for people to replace AT and DOT with ‘@’ and ‘.’  - easy to figure out for a human being but difficult to identify for the robots.

However the best method is to put a contact form where the visitors can fill their request and contact details. The form processing script can then send a mail to you as well as send an automated thank you response to the visitor.

Are you using any other process to provide a channel for your visitors to contact you? Why don’t you post a comment and share that with us and other fellow readers?

Why does this happen? Most of the times, the problem lies with some users who do not check their mails regularly or leave a copy of the emails so that they can get a backup copy if something goes wrong. Naturally this consumes server space.

You can check who is using up how much space by accessing the Cpanel | Mail | Manage email accounts and clicking on disk usage. You can also check the disk usage option in the main Cpanel menu. This will give you an idea of where the space hogs are and how to clear up space so that the emails can be delivered smoothly.

Login to the control panel (visit www.yourdomain.com/cpanel) and click on the Mail Option. Then click on E-mail Filtering. Now click on Add filter.

Say you are getting lots of spam, all with the subject “someone wrote:”. Now if you are sick of these and think that nobody is going to write a genuine mail with ‘wrote:’ in the subject, you can create a filter for killing these spam mails.

1. Login to Cpanel.
2. Click on Mail.
3. Click on email filtering.
4. Click on Add filter.
5. Select Subject in the first drop-down.
6. Select contains in the next drop-down.
7. Enter wrote: in the next field.
8. Select discard in the next field.
9. Click on Activate.

Now you will not be getting all the spam that someone wrote: 

Tags: hosting, spam, anti-spam, email filtering

• attract repeat human visitors
• appeal to the search engines

Here is an ideal solution for the Small and Medium Businesses like yours:

1. Get a blog setup in a section of your website, say at www.yoursite.com/blog.
2. Post news about all the developments, big or small, in your company and the industry, on the blog. Add some commentary or your views about the external events. Give them insights about new appointments at the senior level, new divisions you have opened and like.

Soon you will find that you are developing a loyal readership and your customers, prospects, investors and shareholders have started to watch your blog for updates.

Are blogs easy to update?

Yes, it is quite easy to post to a blog. When you make a new post (as easy as clicking on an option and writing something in a window like you do in Word), all the related tables of content get updated automatically without you needing to bother about any technical issues.

Benefits of blogging:

• You can disseminate information about your company in a way that is favorable to your company.
• You can collect feedback from the people by looking at their comments on your posts.
• Improve branding by the extra exposure.

There are a few drawbacks too:

• You will have to keep the blog updated. The best solution is to assign the update responsibility to a knowledgeable person at a fairly senior level. Or you can assign the responsibility to update the blog to an external agency like us.
• Your competitors may try to sabotage your blog by posting negative comments. You can filter out the obviously spurious ones and respond to the genuine comments to set the record straight.

If you have got all fired up but not sure who will help you set up and manage the blog, I can help. Read the details about our blog setup service here.

1. Your total space will cover the web site space and all the email accounts. So you have to provide ample space so that emails for all the accounts can stay there till you download them.

2. We provide unlimited email accounts. However if you open 20 email accounts in 5 MB space, you can easily understand that there will be too little space for each account. So you should order enough space to provide a decent storage for each account.

3. It is possible to save a copy of incoming mails to any or all accounts, in a separate account. However if you do not download emails of this ‘archive account’ to some computer, soon it will overrun all the space in your account.

Recently a client had his 100 MB account full and was wondering how it can be. After scrutiny we realised, he had one such archive account. This alone was taking 81 MB because he had never downloaded the emails from this account.

4. You will need more space if you do not download your emails frequently. You can manage with much lesser space if you download quite frequently.

5. Similarly some people get only text type emails while others get large attachments with drawings and photos. This can be a factor too.

6. You can manage with lesser space if your web site has only few pages with a few photos. If you have several pages and photos with a bigger versions also (click here to enlarge type), you might be needing more space.

7. If you are using one or more databases, that will also take up space. Do a rough calculation about the number of records that you will store and the record size too. Keep ample margin.

That said, the rate per MB for hiring space on the web servers goes down with higher slabs. So it is not very expensive to go for one slab higher than what you think you will require.

If you are not hosting with us already, you are missing out on a terrific deal and a super personalised service. See our web hosting offers here.

Sometimes the domain records will show our name because by default, the domain gets booked in our name and then we have to change that. Don’t get puzzled or confused. We have no intention to grab your domain name

There is only one exception to this. If you have not paid your dues despite several reminders, we reserve the right to restrict your edit access to the domain records. We will release it as soon as we have received a clear payment.

We feel very bad doing this and have only rarely done this but like everyone, we also have some clients who think we should run after them to get a few hundred rupees payment released. Please honour our time - we would rather spend that serving you.

1. The email clients and servers have become very strict on anti-spam policies. Several anti-virus software delete the attachment, even .zip files, if they suspect that it may have a virus. If you send the link instead, your client can download the file from your site and use it.

2. Say you are sending a 500 KB attachment to 5 people. You don’t want to put all the addresses in a single mail because that might expose one person’s address to the other and also don’t want to use BCC because that looks bad. So you send 5 individual emails.

Now 5 emails, each with 500 KB attachments have to be uploaded, taking considerable time. However if you upload this file to your server and then send the download link to these 5 people, you are only uploading the 500 KB file once, the emails will be small enough. Imagine the savings when you have to send this file to 50 or 100 customers.

3. If you send a large attachment like above, the recipient’s mailbox may get clogged. If he does not have enough free space, the mail may even bounce back to you. No problem when you just send the notification mail.

However, you should delete the uploaded file after a few days to avoid filling up all your allotted space after uploading a few such files.

Case study: Our company

The support in our company is presently managed by Abhijit and Suranjan. Rather than ask people to send emails to their personal accounts, we ask you to send emails to support@… account. By using the email alias function, we send a copy of these emails to both Abhijit and Suranjan (and a copy to me for information).

Now if Suranjan were to leave or he got transferred to another department, you don’t have to change your procedure. We will simply add the internal pointing to the other guy and remove Suranjan from this list. So all the right people will still be getting your emails.

Use this type of addresses for sales, support, info, accounts and other functional addresses in your company. Remember that we allow unlimited email accounts and aliases with every hosting package.
Note: The email client in your executives’ computers should be configured with the ‘Reply-to’ address as the functional address you selected. Otherwise when the support people reply and the client writes back, the email will go to him only and not the whole group.

We have several tools to reduce spam considerably. Here is the most important tip for you:

You should eliminate the catch-all account. While it is a great thing to be able to receive a mail even if the sender mistyped your name, it is the biggest source of spam. You see, the spammers launch a dictionary attack most of the time. So they learn about the existence of your domain name and will send spam (selling Viagra, Vioxx and what not) to Tom, Dick and Harry (and Lisa and Mary) - the typical names that can exist in a domain.

If you have a catch-all account, you will be getting and downloading all these mails on your computer. On the other hand, if you turned off catchall, a mail to all these addresses will be returned by the server itself without bothering you.

You can do this from your Cpanel - if you don’t know how to, contact support.