To help significantly reduce the amount of spam (or Unsolicited Bulk or junk E-Mail) you receive in your inbox, Active Web Hosting has a specific procedure it uses with all E-Mail. Knowing how our E-Mail filtering works will help you to not only filter out unwanted mail, but also help you to ensure that your E-Mail will arrive where it is intended.

How It Works

When someone sends you an E-Mail, it first goes through Active Web Hosting's Spam Filtering process. The process scans the message for any of the web addresses on the spam filter list. If it's not on the list, it checks to see if there were a certain amount of messages with the same exact web address in it that may be spam. If found to be excessive, the web address will be put on the list. This list is updated every half hour. Additionally, any messages deemed to be spam are deleted from the server and will not arrive to your inbox.

If you are finding that some of your mail is not getting to you, you may want to check this list. The numbers on the left are the number of messages received with the phrase or URL on the right found in the E-Mail message. If the entry is 0, this means that the entry was received with twice the amount of allowed messages containing that phrase or URL in the past 10 days. These are still blocked for 10 days. The higher the number, the more likely it is spam and will not reach your inbox.

NOTE: We value your privacy. The spam filtering process is entirely automated. We do not actively read your private E-Mail messages.

Attachment Filename Extensions Refused By The Server

If a message has an attachment that contains one of the filename extensions listed in our FAQ on file attachments, then it will be rejected and not arrive at your inbox, due to the fact that these extensions are commonly used to spread viruses. Our FAQ on file attachments will also tell you how to send files with extensions which are filtered by our server.

WARNING: Please do not open any attachments that you do receive unless you are expecting to receive them. Always scan for viruses before using any file you receive off the internet. A good virus scanner is AVG Anti-Virus which also has a good free version that scans and monitors E-Mail to and from your computer.

Where Messages Go From Here

Any message that has sucessfully passed through the spam filtering process will be delivered immediately to your E-Mail inbox if you do not have a forwarding address specified for that E-Mail account. If you do have a forwarding address specified, the E-Mail is put in the outbox of your E-Mail account and sent on to the forwarding address. You can manage your forwarding address and other E-Mail settings for your account using the web based E-Mail client. Please see our E-Mail FAQs for more information.

What You Can Do

You can retrieve your messages in your inbox using any POP-based E-Mail Client or using the Web Mail Interface. Once you download your messages from the E-Mail client program or web mail interface, the messages should be deleted from the server so as not to fill up your mail box. Full mailboxes will cause further messages to also be refused. Most E-Mail client programs automatically do this for you. However, when using the web mail interface, you will need to delete the messages yourself. Each mail box has an active storage space of 10 Megabytes per E-Mail account.

You can further filter your E-Mail by setting the E-Mail client program's message filtering to detect any messages that contain Spam Related Phrases to your junk mail or other folder so that these messages can be kept separate from your normal E-Mail. Then you can check to see if you wish to keep or delete them.

What happens if messages I want to get are refused?

If you are finding important messages you wish to receive are not arriving to your E-Mail inbox even after checking our own spam filter list, you may wish to check the domain or IP address from that mail server on a service such as SpamCop or SpamHaus to see if it is listed by the service as one which mail servers on the net are rejecting. If this is the case, then mail may have been rejected before it even arrived at Active Web Hosting, or rejected because it was on these lists. If this is the case, then the sender will either have to try to resend from another E-Mail address with a different IP or domain, or work with the listing organization to get their address removed from the list.