Things that can go wrong

From Computer Tyme Support Wiki

Revision as of 22:12, 2 November 2009

Things that can go wrong during Spam Filter Activation

The spam filtering system is pretty simple in design. Normally email goes directly to your email server. To use our filters what you do is tell the world that our servers are the servers that receive email for your domain. This is done through DNS (Domain Name Services). DNS has a record called the MX (Mail eXchange) records to tell the world where the email goes.

When email arrives at our servers we process it and send it on to your server. We have a routing table that we set up when we create your account. We read your current MX record and store it in our table, something like this.

domain.com: mail.domain.com

Normally this just works and everything is happy. It takes several hours for the mew MX information to propagate and quickly the spam dies down to a small trickle. That's what's supposed to happen but sometimes things don't work that way. So here are some things that might happen and what to do about it.

1. One problem that can arise has to do with the configuration of your server that is receiving email from our servers. Your server can start rejecting email that our servers are sending. Why would this happen? Some system are set up so that they have to be the lowest MX record. if they aren't the lowest MX record then they want to forward the email back to our servers and will generally reject email saying that my servers are not allowed to relay mail. And all the email for your domain will start bouncing.
2. Because all the email for your domain starts coming from one source your server's anti-spam software will start getting suspicious because of the volume of email coming from us and decide that we are spammers. They might not reject the messages but slow them down through rate limiting which would cause some of your email to be delayed for hours.
3. Since no spam filter is 100% accurate some spam will get through our filters. Because the spam appears to come from us your server might think we are a spam source and blacklist our servers and start rejecting your email. Sometimes we get listed on spam blocking lists and your hosting company might start blocking based on that list.

There are two kinds of customers; those who own their own servers, and those whose email srvers are controlled by some vendor. If you own your own server you can correct the problem if it is on your end. If you use a vendor then you will need to contact their tech support if it is on their end.

In such a situation there are a number of things that can be done. the first thing you will need is the contact support numbers for both us and them. The first thing to do is to contact us. Even if the problem is not on our end there are many things we can do. first of all we can usually quickly determine exactly what the problem is and what needs to be done. Once we have determined the problem if it is on our end we can immediately fix it. And we would want to know that.

However even if it is not on our end we can often trick your server into taking the email. If it's a blocked IP we can reroute your email to other servers or other IP addresses and bypass the problem. Of your server stops accepting mail for your domain then we can switch to a mose where we accept your email and store it so that it's not lost until the problem is fixed.

If you just turned service on and your server starts bouncing your email then sometimes the best solution is to switch the MX records back and that will fix your email fairly quickly. We can then contact their tech support people and see what we can work out. Some services are just not compatible at all because some vendors are just not sharp enough to properly configure their email servers.

It is important to us that you not lose your email. So if there's a problem we want to fix it.

What to do

If an emergency occurs when you are not getting any email then what you don't want to do is email me from an address that is failed because we can't respond to you. If you are going to email us then send a message from another domain like a yahoo or gmail account and include a phone number in case we need to call you.

If you made a change in something that might have cause the problem then try changing it back. Even if the problem isn't on our end we can help you figure it out. We can also talk to your tech people to help resolve any issues.

To contact us call 415-992-3400 or email support@junkemailfilter.com.

IMPORTANT - If you are not getting any email - don't email us from the domain that is broken because you won't get the reply. Please send an email from another domain such as gmail, yahoo, or hotmail.