We’re happy to announce we’ve improved outgoing email delivery from all our servers for everyone. Prior to this weekend, our email servers would accept external email for your domains, or from your web site contact forms, and based on your email address settings, would do basic scans for spam and virus, then store it in your mailbox, or forward it to your Internet Service Provider (ISP) or other outside email address you specified. The spam filtering is simple keyword scanning and score based (more spammy words equals a higher score), so worked well for most kinds of spam, but not as good when compared to commercial solutions like Postini or Google Apps (Gmail) spam filtering.

The ongoing problem was, certain ISPs would detect that spam and incorrectly block our email servers thinking we were the actual source of the spam, versus relaying it for you as they were configured.

Starting this last weekend, we’re now passing all outgoing email through an external commercial solution for spam filtering, which stops our email servers from being blocked by any ISP, ensure much more reliable email delivery, and should also result in near-zero spam emails being sent to your external email mailboxes.

This does not block spam that is stored in your mailbox, but if you’d like this level of spam filtering added to your mailbox, we’ve secured a rate of $5 per month per mailbox for incoming spam filtering. You could also just forward your email out to a free gmail account, or sign up for Google Apps for your domain, which is also $5 per user per month. We’re happy to answer any questions on which options are best for you.

We strive to offer the best performance-based web hosting, and now the best in email delivery as well.