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New Features for AwesomeAntispam – July

Applied Innovations, launched awesome antispam, just a few weeks ago but we are continually updating the platform and are pleased to announce the following changes were rolled out in the month of July.

Geo-Redundant Filtering Servers

  • We’re pleased to announce that Awesome Antispam now leverages filtering servers in two geographically disperse datacenters, in the event connectivity to one of our datacenters is loss your email messages will automatically be delivered to the other datacenter and then delivered to your mail server.  In addition, each datacenter maintains a redundant pair of mail filtering servers so that if one of the mail filtering servers failed at a datacenter the other would automatically take over.This level of redundancy has been added at no cost to our users.

Filtering Services Improvements/Changes

  • For some messages, we are able to make a definition decision as to whether the message is spam or not.  For others, it’s less clear – for example, a message that’s larger than the allowed size, or a connection that doesn’t complete.  These get an “unknown” classification.  In the statistics displays and API calls, there isn’t an “unknown” category, so no obviously correct place to include these messages.  In the past, we’ve included them in the “Not Spam” group, but since these are mostly spam now, we have moved them to the “Spam” group.  As a result, you may see an increase in the “Spam” statistics and a corresponding decrease in the “Not Spam” statistics, without actually seeing any difference in the raw results.  We have plans to further improve this in the future, so that’s it’s clearer to users.
  • SPF is a protection against phishing (mail that pretends to be from a sender), where senders can identify the servers that are permitted to send mail from a domain. This means that when a message is received from a server that is not permitted, it can be safely rejected, because it must not be legitimate. This is a very strong protection against this type of bad mail, but there are times when it fails and you may need to override it. For example, if you forward messages from one destination to another then the message is no longer coming from the permitted source, and so will be rejected. We very strongly suggest that rather than disabling SPF protection, you change your setup so that important mail is delivered directly without any forwarding. However, if you need to disable SPF, you are now able to do this on a per-sender-domain basis, as well as per-sender-IP. If necessary, you can also disable SPF protection completely, although, again, we strongly recommend against that.

 

Front-end / GUI changes

  • We’ve made a lot of small tweaks to make pages easier to understand and use – for example, the actions on the quarantine pages are more sensibly ordered, the information on the log search page is clearer, the notation options are better explained, and it’s easier to control what happens with really large messages.
  • We strongly recommend that users take advantage of the “two factor authentication” (2FA) system that the front-end offers, where you use not just a username/password, but also a time-limited code from a device like a mobile phone, to log in.
  • When a message cannot be delivered to its recipients nor returned to its sender, the message is marked as “frozen”, and only occasional delivery attempts are made before eventually giving up on the message.

Outlook Client Integration

Awesome Antispam is built on top of the SpamExperts spam filtering appliance.  As such SpamExperts does make available add-ons for most common mail clients and they can be found below.  These add-ons allow you to automatically mark spam messages that make it through to you as spam and help you better customize and train the spam filtering to your unique needs.

 

Don’t have AwesomeAntispam added to your account yet?  visit https://appliedi.net/antispam to learn more and get a free 30 day trial!

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Posted in AppliedI news, Hosting Enhancements

About Jess Coburn

It's Jess's responsibility as CEO and Founder of Applied Innovations to set the direction of Applied Innovations services to ensure that as a company we're consistently meeting the needs of our customers to help drive their success. In his spare time, Jess enjoys many of the things that made him a geek to begin with. That includes sexy new hardware, learning new technology and even a videogame or two! When you can’t find him at the office (which admittedly is rare), you’ll likely find him at the grill or in front of his smoker getting ready for some lip-smacking ribs to enjoy with his wife and two kids.

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