Anti-Spam & Anti-Virus
Email Filtering

Count the time saved by this automatic system - only $6/month

Here are the key points of the service:

• On average, 95% to 99% of spam is filtered out.
• On average, only 1 in 1,000,000 emails are falsely identified as spam.
• Saves you valuable time.
• Anti-spam system automatically updated every 5 minutes with new spam profiles to identify and stop the latest spam. A team of humans handcraft each spam profile as new spam is identified ensuring accurate and timely spam detection.
• It's like having your own personal secretary looking after your email.
• No added email delivery delay.
• Ideal for home use and small business users
• Anti-virus system updated daily to block 100% of known virus threats.
• Protects you, your business and family from viruses, scams emails and obscene material.
• Get back to the important things while Spam Filtering takes care of the SPAM.
  No mailserver reconfiguration needed. Only a simple DNS change is required.
• Upon request, you will be provided with a login to view quarantined spam and/or change your filtering preferences. Filtering preferences can be set on a per domain or per user scope and involve such things as whitelists, blacklists, keywords to block, and more. The defaults work very well, but we recognize there are always a few people who want or need something other than default settings.
• What I have found to be the best way to handle this system is to have the detected spam labeled as "POSSIBLE SPAM" in the Subject line, so you can easily see that it has been detected. You still can read the email if you want. You can also set up your "Message Rules" in your Email Program (Outlook Express) to put this directly into your "Deleted Items" folder. Or, another configuration is to have the possible spam immediately deleted so that you never see it. Contact Alan at Pacific Websites for more info and recommended configurations.
• Contact Alan at Pacific Websites to have this excellent service enabled on your account. Six dollars per month saves a lot of your valuable time. Yearly cost is $72 annually. There is a small charge for setting this up, depending on how your email is presently set up and your desired configuration. I have done this before for several clients and they just love this filtering service.
• This service is available to clients of Pacific Websites who have their hosting through us. If your hosting is not through us, consider switching over for this service alone! If you have any questions, please contact us.

You may have seen statistics on the cost of spam, but for those of you that haven't, here is something you need to know.

For 5 employees working at $10/hr with bandwidth, storage, processing, and employee time, approximately $2,221 per year is lost to spam. That is $444.20 per person per year or $37.02 per person per month lost to spam.

If your company has more employees or pays more than $10/hr, then your costs are probably higher. Of course, if you have time to burn and don't get paid for it, then your only costs are those precious minutes of your life that you could be using to play a game or do something much more enjoyable than sort out spam.

You get up to 35 protected email addresses and up to 10,000 email messages filtered per month per domain. If you use more than that we will automatically upgrade your Anti-Spam & Anti-Virus Email Filtering subscription to the subscription with the appropriate resources.

If you would like this service enabled on your domain, so that it filters spam emails sent to your address (example: you@your-domain.com), please contact Alan at Pacific Websites today, and start saving your valuable time.

Here is a list of free email filtering programs. If you read closely, you will see that each has it's own limitations. The cost of the Spam Filtering through Pacific Websites costs a little each month, and is well worth it. The "Free" programs are not really free when you factor in the limitations. Sometimes, they offer a "free" version, which can be upgraded to a better solution - for a price.

What is unwanted email?

Unwanted email, sometimes known as junk or spam email, is unsolicited email advertising.

Examples of unwanted email:

• Adverts for porn or gambling sites.
• Work-from-home schemes.
• Online pharmacies.
• Advertising “Herbal Viagra” and similarly improbable products.
• Selling implausibly cheap (pirated) software.

A substantial majority of the email that goes over the internet every day is unwanted junk mail.

How spammers get your email address

Spammers collect addresses in many different ways, including:

Guessing. Spammers use automated software to generate addresses.
Harvesting from websites. If an email address is embedded in a webpage, spammers can use spiders (similar to those used by search engines) to find them.
Online registration. If someone gives their email address to a dodgy website or one with a lax privacy policy, the site owner can sell the addresses to spammers.
From other spammers. It’s possible to buy lists of email addresses by the million online.
So-called spam email cancellation services. These bogus services offer to block unwanted email but really collect addresses.

Why stop unwanted email?

• It wastes bandwidth.
• Filtering it manually is very time-consuming.
• Unwanted email often contains offensive images.
• It propagates online fraud, such as phishing.
• Often contains viruses.

How to spot spam

Filtering email manually is time-consuming but here are some tell-tale signs you can use to do so if you only get a limited amount.

• From someone you don’t know.
• Contains weird misspellings (e.g. “p0rn” with a zero), designed to counter spam filters.
• Offers something for sale.
• The subject line and contents don’t match.
• Contains a beguiling or urgent call to action (“Buy now to get 50% off”).

If you get more than a handful of unwanted emails a day, we recommend you use a mail filter to get rid of the rubbish automatically.

If you would like the Spam Filtering service enabled on your domain, so that it filters spam emails sent to your address, please contact Alan at Pacific Websites today, and start saving your valuable time.