The Battle for your Inbox By Jake Winemiller June 2006 As we all know, spam is an ever growing annoyance and it isn’t going away any time soon.  As a web hosting and email provider, we are on the front lines of this battle and constantly working on behalf of our clients in an effort to win the battle of the inbox with combinations of research, technology, and gut instinct.  With that said, we make decisions every day with the best intentions of our client base at heart and while these decisions benefit the vast majority of our clients, they can sometimes be an annoyance for other valued clients.  They say you can’t please all the people all the time, but we promise we won’t stop trying!  Methods to the Madness  Over the past few years we’ve spent a great deal of time and money on methods of filtering spam while doing our very best to make sure messages are not lost and security is not compromised.  We have initiated layered filtering so known spamming servers are blocked at the firewall and the remaining mail is sorted through our filtering and tagging rules in an effort to give our clients and easy-to-sort inbox every morning.  While we find our tagging system is about 95%- 99% accurate on average, the accuracy can vary greatly from client to client.  As an example, our filtering rules for mortgage related spam may be 99% effective for our company and most of our clients, but they may be thrown for a loop when these rules are applied to a client who…works in real estate and mortgages.  With a wide variety of small business clients and a spam problem that’s not going away, how can we all get exactly what we need?  Control…the power is in your hands  We quietly unveiled our custom spam control spam prevention system a few months ago and we thought it was about time we gave our clients a formal introduction to it!  Many of you have already started taking advantage of this system on your own, but for the rest of this may be your first “meet and greet” with the system.  What does this system do?  This system allows you to take our base spam prevention system already in place and customize it for your personal domain.  Ever get that “****spam****” tag on an email from one of your clients and wonder why the heck our system thinks that message is spam?  Chances are, through normal communication in the email, enough keywords or clues in the string of email messages led our system to believe it have reached the threshold for what we believe will likely be spam.  While the rules are generally good, there are always exceptions and good clients, with clean email can be caught along with the bad guys.  However, thanks to the custom spam filtering system you can now simply log onto your control panel and “white list” that particular email or entire domain so you never run into this issue again.  You can add as many white lists as you need.  You can add them 24 hours per day, 7 days per week, and as often as necessary to make sure the filtering and tagging on your domain is as accurate for YOU as it can be!  This system isn’t just for white lists, though.  How about “Blackl ists”?  Is there a particular email address or domain that never gets tagged or blocked by the system before it hits your mailbox?  Now, you can take the power into your own hands and black list that domain in your control panel just as easily as you can white list.  The power of complete customization is in your hands!  Flexibility…It’s a beautiful thing.  These new spam prevention measures don’t stop at global settings for your domain.  You actually have the power to customize the spam prevention on an individual mailbox basis too!  The definition of spam is different not only from company to company, but from cubicle to cubicle.  Why should you be held down by the spam restrictions of your neighbor or in-house email technician?  You no longer are!  This system is easy to use, incredibly powerful, and another small “win” in the battle for your inbox.  At the price of just 25 cents per mailbox (per month), I think you’ll agree it’s an incredibly small price to pay for the power of choice.  Keep an eye on our newsletter for more information on how to best harness the power of this application, but feel free to find out how you can start customizing your mailboxes today by checking out http://dynamicnet.net/customer/hsphere/user/html/antispam.html. Thanks so much for your continued support in our 11th year of operation and if you’d like to learn more about this feature or have any questions at all, please feel free to give us a call at 1-888-887-6727 or submit a support ticket at https://support.dynamicnet.net/support-center/.