What Emails can I send through your Smarthost?

Anything that's not spam or contains a virus.
You can put any email address you like as the From and Reply-To fields in the emails you send through our server.

How Many Emails can I Send through your Smarthost?

The monthly allowance for the Standard Business Option is £14.50 for 5000 emails.
This should be adequate for the majority of businesses up to 20 employees.
If you go over the 5000 mark in some months, even by as much as 50%, we're not going to worry.
For every extra block of 5000 emails you want to send, we charge £7.75 per month, up to 50,000, after which it drops to £4.95 per 5000.

There's no real limit to the amount of emails we can send so if you're a large company or ISP then tell us what you need.
If you're not sure how many emails you're going to send, don't worry, we'll be counting them during your free trial period, to see which price-band you fit into.

What Size of Email Attachment can I send through your Smarthost?

We accept email attachments up to 25mb in size but this does not guarantee that the receiving server will accept attachements of this size and, in general, you'll be lucky if you can successfully send a file bigger than 10mb.
We just don't want our servers to be the limiting factor.

But we have a solution to this problem:-

	You FTP the file you want to send up to your storage area on our server which is also linked to a webserver. (Using FTP is not hard these days when you use an excellent free GUI FTP client such as FileZilla.)
	You then include the link to the file in the body of an email.
	The recipient clicks on the link and downloads the file in their browser.

The size of file you can send this way is only limited by the amount of server storage space you have.
All Smarthost price plans come with some storage space and you can buy extra space if you need it (£2.50/gigabyte/month).
There's more details of this FTP/Webserver file sending solution here.

What Types of Files can I send as Attachments?

All except those likely to contain a virus.
EXE files are the only file-type we block that's likely to cause you a problem, but the majority of email systems block these as well.
Any files inside a ZIP file are allowed to pass or you can always rename a file to TXT and instruct the recipient to rename it back to bypass this restriction..
A full list of the files we block is given in the anti-virus section later on this page
If you use the FTP/Webserver alternative way of sending files, included with our Smarthost service, no files are blocked and this can sometimes be the only way to bypass the file restrictions of the recipient's mail-server.

To Authenticate or not to Authenticate

When you want to send an email through our Smarthosts you usually have to provide the username and password we've given you before your email is accepted.
Many mail-servers, such as Exchange, can perform this authentication automatically but there are some situations where authentication by the sender is not possible.
If you tell us the IP address you mail-server is operating from we can excempt this IP address from having to authenticate before sending.
The only problem with this is that if you change your IP address you'll probably forget to let us know and then you suddenly won't be able to send out emails anymore from the new IP address.

Using our Smarthost to send out Newsletters and Promotional Emails

We're happy for you to use our Smarthost to send out newsletters, special offers, updates etc. but these types of email have the problem that they're more likely to be considered as spam than standard business emails.

If you want us to send out these types of emails, you must obey the following 2 rules, which happen to be in line with current legislation on the subject:-

1 -	Only send emails to people who have positively opted-in to receive them. Don't use bought-in lists of email addresses
2 -	Include, in every email, an easy way to opt-out of receiving further emails - usually called an "unsubscribe link" - and, even though it may pain you to do so, take prompt action to honour these unsubscribe requests.

Also, please, if you receive "Delivery Failure" notices for a particular recipient in 2 consecutive newsletter cycles, then accept that their address is no longer valid and remove it from your mailing list.

We have a special server, just for sending newsletters, called our Mailshot server which is optimised for sending newsletters by, for instance, sending out emails more slowly.
Every 3 emails you send out via Mailshot only count as 1 towards your monthly allowance so, with the Business Light option, you can send 3000 regular emails per month or you can send 9000 via Mailshot.
This works out at less than £1 per 1000 newsletters.

	You can also send out any combination of regular and newsletter emails.
	You can still send newsletters via our normal servers, if it's more convenient and you don't mind about using up more of your allowance.
	You could also send regular emails via Mailshot but, at busy times there may be delays, and the size limit on attachments is 1mb.

Email marketing only works if the recipient is happy to receive your emails.
This can be a fragile relationship and if you alienate your subscriber base by sending emails too often or with repetative or irrelevent content they'll click "unsubscribe".
(Don't make them remember a password in order to do this!)
If you persist they'll complain, we'll get blacklisted, your account will be suspended and then nobody's happy anymore.

While you can use Outlook for smaller, simple newsletters, you'll probably need a special purposes program if you do this type of marketing more seriously.
One such program is SendBlaster.

Who Are Ya? Who Are Ya?

We get a lot of fraudsters trying to access our Smarthosts, especially the free trial, so, when applying to use our service please help us to confirm that you are genuine by:-

1 -	Using your company email address and not a free address such as Yahoo or Gmail.
2 -	Giving us the address of your company website.
3 -	Making a small payment for a month's allowance on one of our Lighter Use options so you can tryout our services.
4 -	There may be perfectly valid reasons why you can't do any of the above so phone us on 0800 634 9870 and explain.

We value our customers and apologise for any delay or inconvenience our security checks may cause.

Your ISP is Blocking Port 25

To send email on the Internet you must use TCP Port 25.
Some ISPs block this port, outgoing, to prevent virus programs with built-in
mail-servers, sending out spam and other undesirable email from an infected PC.
The only thing you're allowed to connect to over port 25 is the ISP's own SMTP server which you are, therefore, required to use.
Using the ISPs SMTP server may be fine but sometimes, if you aren't using a From address in your outgoing emails that has been allocated to you by the ISP, these emails will be rejected by this SMTP server.
The solution is to send your emails to our Smarthost using a different TCP Port and we'll then send these emails on to their destinations using port 25.

Heavy-Handed Spam Measures

In panic, some companies install a heavy-handed anti-spam system with nobody monitoring it for false positives.
Our server logs show that these companies' mail-servers are happily accepting emails from us which they then dump, with no warning to anyone.
You normally discover this is happening by telephoning your contact in the other company to ask why they haven't responded to your email.
You can report such situations to us and we'll approach their IT department and ask them to white-list our server.

There are Emails that our Smarthost Just Can't Deliver

 

"It's my job to monitor the mail queues on Arrowmail's Smarthost Servers to check that things are running smoothly, and the queues I'm particularly interested in are the Outgoing Queue, the Retry Queue and the Bad Queue. The vast majority of emails zip through the Outgoing Queue in a fraction of a second, on the way to their destination. If the first attempt to send an email fails then this email stays in the Outgoing Queue for an hour and, every minute, another attempt is made to send the email to each of the servers listed in the destination's MX records, in turn and in order of priority. An attempt is even made to send to the default IP address of the recipient's domain as the RFC documents that specify how email should work, don't actually require the use of MX records. Emails often hang around in the Outgoing Queue for 10 minutes or so because the receiving mail-server is playing the "grey-listing" game: purposely refusing an email for a set period of time to test the persistence of the sending server, with the assumption that mail-servers sending millions of spam emails won't be very persistent. You've never seen a server as persistent as our Smarthost! Other emails don't get delivered because there are no DNS records containing instructions on where to deliver them to, or the mail-servers that are specified aren't responding. There are 4 main reasons of this:- 1 - The To: email address is spelt incorrectly. An email to johnsmith28@hotmail.comn is never going to be delivered because the top-level domain is invalid, but Outlook doesn't complain about this when you click Send. Sometimes, in the first hour, I will play the Guardian Angel and correct the spelling mistake but only when the correct spelling is absolutely obvious. 2 - The email trying to be delivered is an automated reply to some spam that's been received from a made-up email address. This could be an Out-of-Office reply, a polite message saying that the email to adolphyang@yourcompany.co.uk, or some equally unlikely sounding member of staff you've never had, couldn't be delivered, or even a message from your server saying:- "Your last email was rejected as spam". Please, all you Exchange Administrators out there, these messages, provoked by a spam email, are just as much a waste of Internet bandwidth as the spam itself, so stop your server generating them! Perhaps you need to get a better anti-spam system, like the one found elsewhere on this page. 3 - The To: email address, or even the whole domain itself, was once valid but has now lapsed and the person or company you're trying to contact has either got a new email address or ceased to exist. 4 - The recipient's mail-server is having temporary technical problems or perhaps the MX records are in the process of being changed. When an email still can't be delivered after an hour, 2 things happen:- 1 - The email moves to the Retry Queue. 2 - A warning email is generated and sent to the sender which says:-   The attached message had transient non-fatal delivery errors THIS IS A WARNING MESSAGE ONLY - YOU DO NOT NEED TO RESEND YOUR MESSAGE! This server is configured to automatically retry delivery at configured intervals. Subsequent attempts to deliver this message are pending. This warning email also contains an extract of the conversation between our Smarthost and the receiving mail-server which often reveals the nature of the problem: non-existent user, mailbox full, etc. This warning email is send because you need to know if your email hasn't been delivered after and hour and, most-times, you'll spot the spelling mistake that you made in the To: or CC: address straight away, correct it and re-send the email. That's why, after the hour's up, the Guardian Angel stays out of it. An attempt to deliver emails waiting in the Retry Queue is made once every hour for five whole days. This gives time for any failed server to be repaired or changed MX records to propagate around the Internet. To be honest, only a very small percentage of emails, usually those destined for servers that manage to recover from their technical difficulties, ever get off the Death Row of the Retry Queue, and that's despite all the conscientious efforts of our Smarthosts. The Retry Queue is a great indicator, for me, as to when there are problems I need to investigate. For example, if the Retry Queue suddenly has 20 emails waiting to go to yahoo.com addresses, I have to activate a routing rule to send emails, destined for Yahoo, via a one of our alternative mail-servers while I approach Yahoo to see what they think we've done wrong. After 5 days is up, emails from the Retry Queue move to the Bad Queue while the sender receives this obituary:-   The attached message had PERMANENT fatal delivery errors! After one or more unsuccessful delivery attempts the attached message has been removed from the mail queue on this server. The number and frequency of delivery attempts are determined by local configuration parameters. YOUR MESSAGE WAS NOT DELIVERED TO ONE OR MORE RECIPIENTS! Sometimes you'll receive the above message minutes after sending an email if the receiving server flatly refuses to accept the email. When a server refuses an email with an error-code in the 500s, RFC-compliance means we mustn't attempt to send that email again. Emails in the Bad Queue are periodically deleted. It's worth mentioning that if you send an email to multiple recipients, including copies or blind copies, your email splits into one email per recipient when it arrives at our Smarthost and each email is then treated separately, so one bad address won't prevent your email being delivered to all the other recipients.

Encrypting Outgoing Emails

Our Smarthost supports (but doesn't require) TLS encryption (Transport Layer Security) when receiving emails from your server.
Using TLS means your emails will be strongly encrypted as far as our server.
To enable this on your Exchange Server is simply a tick in a box (exactly where to find this tick-box is shown on our Smarthost configuration instructions page here).

Whether or not you use encryption to send emails to us, our Smarthost will attempt to negotiate an encrypted channel when sending your emails onto the receiving mail-server but, in most cases, this is declined by the other mail-server and the emails pass in plain text.
Our Smarthost does its best to keep your outgoing emails encrypted but can't guarantee they'll remain encrypted all the way from your Outbox to the recipient's Inbox.

Create a Special DNS Record to Help us Send your Emails More Reliably

If you decide to use our Smarthost servers, you can help by creating a special DNS record with whoever is handling the DNS for your domain name, usually your domain registrar.

This DNS record is to comply with the Sender Policy Framework (SPF) anti-spam initiative and it identifies our servers as being approved for sending emails from your domain.
It's a TXT record, which not all DNS servers or ISP control panels can handle, but if they can, this is the record you need to add:-

mycompany.co.uk.   IN   TXT   "v=spf1 include:arrowmail.co.uk -all"

This is how it should appear in your DNS Zone File, including the inverted commas, but with your domain name substituted for "mycompany.co.uk".
If you give us the logon details for your domain registrar's control panel we'll set it up for you.

The Wikipedia entry for Sender Policy Framework is here.

If your current DNS servers can't handle TXT records then you could move to DNS servers that can. This doesn't require you to change domain registrar.
www.nettica.com will host your domain's DNS service, along with TXT records, on their servers forever for a one-off payment of US$40.

The SPF system has not yet been adopted widely enough to be a reliable method of identifying spam but it can tip the balance in your favour when sending an email, especially with heavy-handed anti-spam systems.

We also attach a DKIM signature and HashCash token to each outgoing email to comply with other anti-spam initiatives.

To setup ring-fencing, no equipment or software is installed on your server or your LAN.

2 steps are required to set it up:-

1 -

Edit the DNS MX records for your email domain. You need to set our mail-servers to be the ones responsible for email sent to your domain. You do this by editing the DNS MX records for your domain as shown below:- You can keep your server as a lower priority MX record if you wish. We're happy to edit your DNS settings for you if you can let us know your domain registrar control-panel logon details. All incoming emails sent to your domain will now come to our servers. This has the added bonus of reducing the amount of Internet bandwidth and server resources you're wasting on dealing with spam.

2 -

Configure your mail-server to only accept incoming email from our servers and use our server to send all your outgoing email. If your mail-server is Microsoft Exchange, there are instruction on how to configure it to only accept emails from our servers here and instruction for configuring it to send all outgoing email through our servers here. We're happy to perform these configuration steps for you if you're prepared to give us remote access to your server. Your server will still be able to accept connections from your remote users checking their email.

Simple Email Backup

If your server or Internet connection fails, we'll hold all your incoming email on our server, indefinitely, until your server comes back on line when they'll then be automatically forwarded on.
If your server is down for an extended period, you're able to read these emails waiting on our server using an IMAP or POP3 account.

More Information

Anti-Virus

We scan all attachments in your emails for viruses and delete them if any are found.
Attachments of types used almost exclusively for sending viruses are also removed.

More Information

Spam Filtering

We classify all your incoming emails into:-

Not Spam	These are passed, unchanged onto your server.
Definite Spam	These are deleted.
Probable Spam	These have their Subject Lines modified to add the Spam Score so that you can use Outlook Mailbox Rules to automatically move these emails, as they come in, to your Junk E-mail folder where you can check them, occasionally, for False Positives. Optionally, we can send all Probable Spam to a single separate mailbox so that one person at your organisation can check for False Positives for all of your users.

Spam that our server has missed, or any False Positives you find, can be re-submitted to our Spam Filtering system. Instructions on how to do this are here.
Phishing emails are also trapped by our Spam Filter.

More Information

Smarthost

All your outgoing emails are sent from your server to our SMTP servers which then delivers them to their final destinations.
Sending emails used to be a simple process but, with all the anti-spam measures now in place across the Internet, it requires special techniques and configuration settings to maintain a mail-server's status of being trusted by other mail-servers as a source of genuine emails.

More Information

These emails will be virus-scanned and then stored in a "gateway".
A gateway is a mailbox, accessible by you using IMAP or POP3.
Also, our server is constantly trying to forward-on any emails in this gateway to your primary mail-server and will never send failure messages back to senders, so once your
mail-server comes back on-line, all the emails waiting in the gateway will be transferred to your server and then distributed to your users' Inboxes.

In normal operation the occasional email will come through our server when your server is too slow to respond to an impatient sending server, perhaps due to a burst of email activity at your end.
These emails will be immediately forwarded on from our server to your in-house server.

While your server is down, someone can be regularly checking the gateway mailbox, probably printing and passing on important email to other users, deleting any unwanted emails and leaving routine emails for when things are back to normal.
Maybe they can download important attachments to a flash drive for passing around.

You can use the SMTP service on our server to send replies while your system's down although you may have to keep changing the From address to make the sent emails appear to come from the right person.
Alternatively, you can send out emails, to and from any address you wish, on our free service here.

If you use POP3 to check the gateway email, you'll probably want to tick the box:-
"Leave a copy of messages on server".

We recommend using Outlook Express with an IMAP account, although POP3 is OK too.
IMAP allows you to see all the To, From and Subject headers without having to download the complete emails and attachments which can help if you are having to do this over a dial-up or GPRS connection.

If you don't feel comfortable making changes to your MX records, in order to set our servers as your backup, we can do this for you if you can let us know your domain registrar control-panel logon details.

You're welcome to make the occasional test of the backup system by purposely disabling your main server.

When standby mode is active, there's no extra charge, storage limitations or time limit to get your main system operational again, as long as the standby situation isn't going to be permanent.

Check out our Rolling Archive service, which holds a copy of all your company's email for the last month, in case some disaster with your server causes you to lose the originals.

This does mean the odd spam message will make it through to your Inbox (some days are worse than others) but, more importantly, some genuine emails will need rescuing from the spam folder, a job only a human can do.

To take advantage of our anti-spam system you need to modify the DNS MX records for your email domain to point to our servers, as shown below:-

There's more information on MX records here.

If you'd feel more comfortable, you can put an additional MX record, with priority 40, pointing to your in-house server in case we have a total multi-site failure.
If you do this, you should disable your server from accepting email from anyone else except our mail-servers, in normal operation, as it's a spammer's trick to send their emails directly to mail-servers listed in lower priority MX records.
The theory being that these standby mail-servers have less powerful anti-spam defences.
If your mail-server is Microsoft Exchange, there are instruction on how to configure it to only accept emails from our servers here.

Classifying Emails into Various Categories

We then classify all incoming emails into 3 categories:-

Not Spam	These are passed on, unchanged, to your server.
Definite Spam	These are deleted.
Probable Spam	These have their Subject Lines modified to add the Spam Score so that you can use Outlook Mailbox Rules to automatically move these emails, as they come in, to your Junk E-mail folder which you can check, occasionally, for False Positives:-
	The characters your rule should look for in the Subject Line are:- [***SPAM*** Score/Req: Optionally, we can send all Probable Spam to a single separate mailbox, on your server or ours, where one person at your organisation can check for False Positives for all your users.

If you take the option for all Probable Spam for your company to go into one mailbox on our servers, it stays there for 7 days before being automatically deleted.
This gives a chance for someone in your company - the Spam Meister - to use, most likely, Outlook Express and an IMAP account to check the Spam folder for false positives - doing this once a day is usually sufficient.

If you find false positives from regular correspondents then you can send us their email addresses for white-listing.

You can forward any spam that makes it through to your user's inboxes, as well as any False Positives, back to us, so our spam filtering system can learn from it's mistakes.
They have to be forwarded in a special way in order to preserve their original formatting, details are here.

If you currently collect your email from a Catch-All POP3 mailbox at an ISP it's best to delete the MX record that points to this and not leave it as a standby.
We find that these Catch-All mailboxes usually accept all the rubbish that's sent to them, so if our mail-servers refuse a spam email it will most likely try other MX records and so still get through via the Catch-All mailbox.

We find we have greater success determining if an email is spam when tackling the
spam-sending engines head on instead of after an email has already been accepted into a Catch-All mailbox.

If your company is drowning in spam, or you current anti-spam measures aren't working then give our system a try.

These are the advantages:-

1 -	A dramatic reduction in the amount of spam arriving in users' Inboxes - but not quite a total elimination yet.
2 -	A method where you can easily identify and recover false positives.
3 -	No need to make new senders go through an authentication process before their email will be delivered.
4 -	The hordes of spammers will no longer be banging on your door wasting your firewall and server resources and chewing up your Internet bandwidth. The change in MX records will have sent them all away to our servers to deal with.
5 -	Because of the way our anti-spam system works, you automatically get included the Simple Backup System detailed elsewhere on this page.

Our spam filter is very fast so the delay in routing emails through our server and then onto yours, instead of your server accepting emails directly is usually no more than 1 minute.

FTP has a reputation as being "geeky" and insecure.
Modern graphical FTP clients hide all the underlying geekiness and Arrowmail supports secure FTP, where all file transfers and the exchange of passwords are performed using strong encryption.

All operating systems follow the same FTP standards so the computer used to upload or download a file can be a Windows PC, a Mac, a Linux box or just about anything else.

Here are some quick definitions of FTP jargon:-

FTP Client	The program you run on your PC to access an FTP Server to upload or download files.
FTP Server	The program that runs on a server computer, connected to the Internet, which stores the files that have been uploaded and makes then available for downloading.
Resume	If you are downloading a 300mb file from an FTP server and your Internet connection fails after 290mb have been downloaded, the ability to "resume" means that, once you've reconnected to the FTP server, you can pick up where you left off and just download the last 10mb of the file instead of having to start from the beginning again.

There are many, very good FTP clients available.
We recommend the free one called FileZilla

To access an FTP Server you only need 3 bits of information:-

1 -	The Hostname of the FTP Server - such as ftp.arrowmail.co.uk
2 -	Your Username for the server
3 -	Your Password for the server

When you connect to an FTP server with FileZilla, the left-hand window shows files and folders on your local PC and the right-hand window shows files and folders on the FTP server.
Drag-and-drop left-to-right to upload, right-to-left to download.
How hard is that?

There's more info about using an FTP client here.

OK, so you might be able to work out how to use an FTP Client to upload files, but are your customers going to find using FTP so easy? Don't answer that because they don't have to!
There's also a webserver running at the location where your FTP files are stored, so files can be downloaded using a web browser, which is another thing that everyone knows how to do.

For example, if you upload a file called brochure.pdf to the Arrowmail FTP server, you can send your customers an email containing the following link:-

https://www.arrowmail.co.uk/yourcompany/public/brochure.pdf

and when they click on the link in the email, the file called brochure.pdf will start to download - give it a try?.
(Note the https:// prefix, signifying that the file will be downloaded over a strongly encrypted channel - http:// also works.)

How cool is that? It makes your company look like it knows a thing or two about the Internet.

Files in the /public/ folder can be downloaded by anyone as long as they know the name of the file, but they can't change or delete files, upload new files or browse the Public folder for anything that takes their fancy.

If you had uploaded brochure.pdf to the /yourcompany/ folder and emailed the link:-

https://www.arrowmail.co.uk/yourcompany/brochure.pdf

then the browser would ask for your username and password before it would allow the file to be downloaded.

Arrowmail's FTP/Web Server combination allows files to be easily and conveniently sent to customers as well as allowing confidential files to be transferred securely to people that you trust.

When an infected email is found it's simply deleted.
No email with a virus attached will have any legitimate content.
We don't send an NDR (Non-Delivery Report) or other notification to the sender or recipient.
The sender's address will have been forged, you don't need to know about yet another attempt to send you a virus email and so we don't want to waste any more Internet bandwidth for the sake of a virus.

As a second line of defence we also perform "Pre-emptive Virus Protection".
This means deleting emails with file attachments of the types used, almost exclusively, for transmitting viruses.
In this way we provide protection against new viruses which our virus scanner doesn't yet know about.

These are the attachments types that we currently block:-

ade

adp

bas

bat

chm

cmd

com

cpl

crt

exe

hlp

hta

inf

ins

isp

js

jse

lnk

mbd

mde

msc

msi

msp

mst

pcd

pif

reg

scr

sct

shs

shb

vb

vbs

vbe

wsf

wsh

wsc

The file-types filtered out by our email servers could, if double-clicked on, cause Windows to open the file in a program that will then automatically execute code to install a virus or perform some other undesirable action.

All other file types, including DOC, XLS and PDF files, are only deleted if they are determined to be carrying a virus.

Microsoft Office files are not so safe, and they have been known to carry macros that act like viruses. However, if they get the all-clear from our virus scanner, we let them pass as it wouldn't be practical to block such popular files on the basis that they may contain an, as yet unknown, macro virus.

It is highly unlikely that you would ever want to send or receive files of the types blocked by our mail-server.
EXE and MSI files may be used legitimately to send software installation programs but it is too risky to let them pass through.
If you do want to send someone an EXE file we advise that you put the EXE file inside a ZIP file and send that or you could change the extension name to TXT before you attach it and let the recipient know to rename it back to EXEafter they've received it.

Although there are many examples of ZIP file email attachments containing viruses we do allow them to pass if a scan of the ZIP file's contents doesn't show any viruses.
However password-protected ZIP files are blocked as these are encrypted and so impossible to scan and have been used to transmit viruses (the password is given in the body of the email and the recipient is encouraged to use it to open the ZIP file and run the virus program it contains).

Remember that all commonly used file extensions are allowed to pass through our mail servers after virus scanning. This includes DOC, XLS, PDF, and PPT.

We include virus-scanning as a free extra to all the other services we offer that involve your emails passing through our servers.

Finding viruses in emails is relatively easy and reliable compared to determining which emails are spam.
There are, however, many emails around that do not contain viruses and are written in simple, plain non-spammy language which, however, contain a link to a webpage which will try and trick you into downloading a virus, spyware program or revealing personal information.
Some of these email will be caught by our spam filter but others will get through and so you still need to employ the following protective measures on your PC to be completely safe:-

1 -	Real-time Antivirus Protection
2 -	Anti-Spyware protection
3 -	Common sense

And, by the way, we will never send you emails saying that unless you click on a link and update your details we will suspend your account.
In fact you should treat any email, claiming to be from us, that you weren't expecting, as suspicious.