Frequently Asked Question

Inbound Mail

Our general policy is that we'd rather have 20 spam messages delivered than have one real message lost.

If you use our email server, you're sharing the same email server that we use for TechSurgeons.

We have a fair amount of filtering in place to keep spammers from flooding mailboxes. The most simple 'filter' we have is that we expect the sending email server to follow the rules of email, and mail from those who don't are rejected.

After that, there are a few other filtering tools we use.
1) Greylisting - email servers that are new to us are "greylisted" for 5 minutes to see that they're real, following the rules, and not just facsimile email servers set up by bozos just for sending spam
2) Blocklists - we use the SpamCop blacklist to block known bad email servers.
3) Rules based filtering - we use tools like SpamAssassin and Amavis to scan for specific keywords in the email to determine if a message is spam (This is where the spam score you occasionally see are set.)