Wholesale spam filtering
Setting up a mail filtering solution from scratch can be a daunting business. You need to be on top of greylisting, content scanning, virus signature databases, the politics of blackhole lists and other fiddly techniques to make sure that the junk stays out, and no legitimate email is thrown away.
But if you host at Bytemark, we can take this job off your hands from only £0.01 per domain per month, with a free trial available to every customer.
You simply re-route your email through our filtering cluster, then we turn away the viagra adverts and viruses, and forward the rest on, typically reducing your mail volume by 80-90%. Configuration takes seconds and you can find out how to do it on our nospam setup page
Prices (from 21st June 2008)
We charge for filtering based on the volume of legitimate email your domain received (so you don’t pay for spam), starting at only £0.01 per domain.
If you have more than one domain with us, you will get charged for the total volume of mail across all the domains, subject to a minimum of £0.50 per domain.
| Maximum volume | Price |
| 1MB | £0.50 |
| 10MB | £1.00 |
| 50MB | £2.00 |
| 100MB | £3.00 |
| 200MB | £4.00 |
| 500MB | £5.00 |
| 1000MB | £8.00 |
New domains receive a free one-month trial, with reports emailed every week so you can see what volume and price you can expect.
You receive less legitimate mail than you think! Currently only 16% of domains configured on our system use more than 50MB per month, and 50% use less than 10MB.
Your questions answered
Why is Bytemark’s spam filter better?
- No free lunch Free email providers need to sell your data directly or indirectly to advertising companies – our revenue stream comes only from our hosting, and we don’t have any surprise business plans based on your data.
- Rejected messages are bounced properly – some filters pretend to accept all messages but only deliver some on, so when it makes a mistake, the sender never knows the message has gone astray. Bytemark make sure the sender gets informed.
- Priced fairly We charge based on the amount of mail, not the number of users, nor our best guess at what you can afford.
What if a genuine email is turned away?
Our system is tuned to err on the side of caution and we’ve not had any false positives during trials.
Rejected email is declined at the point of delivery, such that senders will receive a bounce message which you can write yourself.
How much will my domain cost me?
If you don’t know how much email you receive, our servers will automatically give you a 1-month free trial. You will be emailed a report each week telling you how much email has been passed, and what charge that would incur after the trial.
Additionally, you are charged on the total volume of email for all your domains with a minimum of 50p per domain.
So I have to pay when your system wrongly delivers spam?
We are certain that the rate of “false positives” (i.e. spam that slips through the net) is low enough not to affect your overall pricing.
How can I tune the service?
You can choose whether to use greylisting, anti-virus or content scanning (unless you have very specific needs we’d advise leaving all three turned on).
You can write your own bounce message when mail is turned away.
You can tell the system to never bounce a message by instead forwarding suspect messages to a ‘quarantine’ email address.
Details on how to do all of this are on the setup page
What diagnostics are there?
At the moment, we keep only what is necessary for billing purposes. You will receive an email at the end of each month summarising how much email has passed through the system for all your domains, and what charges have been incurred.
We are planning on integrating some more details about the service into our control panel – this is planned by September 2008.f