Dealing with Spam (unsolicited email)
Too much junk mail making its way into your inboxes?
If you'd like us to make personalized recommendations, please create a folder titled "spam examples," and drop helpful examples of the spam you're receiving there. Once you have a representative collection of spam in that folder, please open a ticket with our support team with a request to review that folder, and make recommendations to reduce spam, by emailing us at support@cloudiance.com.
Some actions you may take independently, and some we on which we can collaborate include:
1. White/blacklisting. You can white/blacklist senders from Cloudiance's integrated advanced anti-spam/virus solution, free-of-additional charge. Please reference: Advanced anti-spam & anti-virus system ( Login to ASAV: https://asav.zmailcloud.com )
2. SPF, DKIM and DMARC. These solutions, free-of-additional charge, require you to make changes to your your domain(s)' DNS, and for some, such as DKIM, we must work in concert. Please reference: First SPF, then DKIM, then DMARC. What's the difference between them?
3. Grey-listing. enable greylisting for your domain(s), free-of-additional charge. For most domains, it's enabled by default.
Greylisting temporarily rejects all email and requires the sending server to send it again after 5 minutes. This delay is beneficial as:
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Spammers will generally not retry to send an email, while legitimate servers do.
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The delay gives time for an IP address to be listed on RBLs if it is spam.
While grey-listing is highly effective at blocking spam it comes at the cost of mail being delayed by up to five (5) minutes, depending on the sender.
If you'd like us to disable, or enable grey-listing for your mailboxes, please open a support ticket. Note that it must be enabled by domain, so it is either on or off for all mailboxes of any given domain name.
4. Anti-spoofing. Enable anti-spoofing for your domain(s), free-of-additional charge.
Anti-spoofing rejects mail that appears to be coming from your domain(s), but is actually from an external source.
One downside of this option is that email from your domain(s) external websites, such as those used to send forms from your website, and sometimes other systems like mailing list managers, and anywhere else you have authorized to send from your domain, will also be rejected.
5. Spam scoring. Change how spam is scored. Prior to being deposited in your mailbox(es), mail received by our anti-spam and virus system is automatically scored by the system based on a variety of factors. This scoring can be changed for customers with their own servers, such as those with Exclusive Hosting, or Server Care. Note that a potential downside of changing this scoring is increasing the likelihood of false-positives, that is, falsely identifying email as Spam. The default for most domains is 7.5. We recommend a score between 4 and 5 tuned, based on your feedback on the affect of changing the score on your false positives.
6. Anti-phishing. As of late March, 2020, we can enable anti-phishing for your domain(s). There is an additional, per mailbox licensing charge for this service. It works by actually re-writing URLs in email received by your domain(s)' mailboxes, so it is highly effective at stopping phishing. This is now part of our Reputation Protection services, and is the only solution proposed here that involves an extra fee per mailbox monthly.
