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"Our Exchange server was being hit
with 1000s of spam emails a day.
When we routed our email via Arrowmail's servers it all went quiet,
the server and Broadband connection were faster and the level of spam in
users' Inboxes was
dramatically reduced." |
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Support Services for Existing Company Email Systems
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Could your company's
mail-server do with some help in today's challenging email environment? |
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A partnership between
your mail-server and
our highly-available, versatile mail-servers,
directly connected to the Internet's fast lane, provides the most
cost-effective, complete business email solution. |
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Achieve the perfect email
system for your business without having to upgrade your in-house system or
relinquish too much control. |
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Arrowmail's SMTP Servers can:-
Get your business emails delivered reliably
Send large quantities of emails quickly
Enable your website to email visitor feedback to you
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What
makes our Smarthost so smart? |
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Smarthost - An SMTP Server for Expert Email
Delivery
Why Can't your own Server send out Emails Reliably Anymore?
As spam now makes up 95% of all email traffic, companies and ISPs are taking
strong measures to reduce the amount of spam their users receive, which makes it
harder to get genuine emails delivered to recipients who
want to receive them.
For a mail-server to successfully send out emails it
has to have the proper credentials and be trusted by the rest of the
mail-servers on the Internet. If your mail-server can't get emails
delivered to Hotmail, Yahoo and AOL addresses, amongst others, then it may
not be trusted, probably because of a DNS name configuration problem or the IP
address it's operating behind is on someone's blacklist.
Maintaining the trustworthiness of your sending server is an on-going job.
This involves keeping up with the latest "good behaviour" standards, being fully
RFC-compliant, staying off blacklists and requesting ISPs to trust your server.
We do all of this, and more, to keep our sending servers trusted and constantly
monitor them for problems.
We have multiple IP address ranges, a server in the US and backup routes with
partner mail-servers, just in case we have difficulties getting emails
delivered to certain
addresses.
You can have your company's mail-server pass all of
it's outgoing emails directly to our servers which
will then do the actual sending. That's called "using a Smarthost".
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Smarthost service: |
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What Emails can I send using 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 using our servers.
How Many Emails can I Send with your Smarthost?
We estimate that an average business user sends between 300 and 500 emails per
month. A company may send out a newsletter to, say, 1000 customers and perhaps a
few people forward all their incoming email to their Blackberry. A typical
company with less than 20 employees might send out 5000 emails per month for
which we charge £14.50.
If you go over the 5000 mark in some months, even by as much as 50%, we're not
going to worry. There's no "hard limit" to the number of emails you can send and
we'll certainly talk to you first, before taking any action, if you regularly
exceed your allocation by a large amount. For every extra block of 5000
emails you want to send, we charge £7.50 per month, up to 50,000, after which it
drops to £7.50 per 10,000.
There's no real limit to the amount of emails we can send so, if you're a large
company or ISP, 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.
We don't charge by the size of the emails you send.
A one line email costs the same as an email with a 10mb attachment and there's
no monthly limit to the total amount of bandwidth you can use to
send all of your emails.
An email sent to multiple recipients splits into one email per recipient at our servers.
So, for example, an email with a total of 50 To, CC and Bcc
recipients counts as you sending 50 emails.
What Size of Email Attachment can I send using your Smarthost?
We accept email attachments up to 40mb in size but this does not
guarantee that the receiving server will accept attachments of this size and,
in general, you'll be lucky if you can successfully send a file larger than
10mb.
We just don't want our servers to be the limiting factor.
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.
If you ever need to send an EXE file, you can rename the file
extension to TXT and instruct the
recipient to rename it back when they've received it.
A full list of the files we block is given in the anti-virus section later on this page.
We don't block password-protected files but you
should be aware that some email-systems do block them on the basis that they
can't be scanned for viruses.
Using one of the many cloud storage services that are now available with several free gigabytes
is probably the best way to send large files or file-types likely to be blocked.
After dragging the file you want to send to the "cloud folder" on your computer
it will then be uploaded to the Internet and you can then just send a link to
the file in your email.
Auto-Correction of Misspelled Email Addresses
It's very easy to make a typing error when entering an email address.
If the error is in the domain part of the address (to the right
of the @ symbol) then the error will most likely create a
recipient domain that doesn't exist and so you will get a failure message back
from our servers, you will then have to realise your error and resend the email
to the correct address.
There are many common misspellings of domains that occur regularly:-
entering gmail.co.uk instead of gmail.com is one example.
When the correct spelling is obvious and unmistakable, like in the above, our
servers correct the error and send the email to the corrected address.
You also get an email letting you know that your email has been auto-corrected:-
Our servers do make an attempt to send the email to the original address
that you entered before attempting to correct it, in case it wasn't a mistake after all.
To Authenticate or not to Authenticate
When you want to send an email to 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 your mail-server is operating from, we can exempt
this IP address from having to authenticate before sending.
The only problem with this is, if you change your IP address, you'll have to
remember to let us know the new IP address in order to continue to send emails
without authentication.
Using our Smarthosts to send out Newsletters and Marketing Emails
Arrowmail is about sending standard business and personal emails as reliably as possible.
We'd rather not send Marketing Emails, as it's this
type of email that causes us all the problems with complaints about us sending
out spam. Saying that, we also have many customers who send
Newsletter/Marketing emails through us successfully and without any problems.
The question is, do you know the ground rules for sending these types of emails?
Will you stick to them despite the temptations to market your product or organisation as widely and forcefully as possible?
Are you prepared to put in the effort to keep your mailing lists up-to-date?
If your main purpose in considering using Arrowmail's smarthost service is to send out Marketing emails then please read our rules on
this page before wasting your time and ours by applying for a trial, generating complaints for sending spam,
getting our servers blacklisted and having your account suspended.
Who Are Ya? Who Are Ya?
We get a lot of fraudsters applying for a free trial of our Smarthosts, hoping to
use them to send out their spam so, when you apply 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 - |
There may be perfectly valid reasons why you can't do any of the above so
email your request to info@arrowmail.co.uk
or call us so you can explain your situation.
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We value our customers and apologise for any delay or inconvenience our security
checks may cause.
What Happens if 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 emails 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 the standard port 25. All our servers are setup to
receive emails over ports 25 and 587.
There are Emails that our Smarthost Just Can't Deliver
Here's a contribution from our
Smarthost Administrator:- |
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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 servers.
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 Smarthosts 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 Smarthosts do their 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 lessen the chances of
your emails being classified as spam by creating a special DNS record called an
SPF record
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.
For more details about how to create an SPF record, click
here.
We also attach a DKIM signature to each outgoing email to comply with another anti-spam initiative.
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Smarthost Prices
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Smarthost Monthly Charge |
Emails Sent per Month |
1,000 |
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£2.95 |
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2,000 |
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£5.95 |
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3,000 |
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£9.95 |
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5,000 |
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£14.40 |
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10,000 |
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£21.75 |
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each additional 5000, up to 50,000 |
add £7.25 |
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each additional 10,000 over 50,000 |
add £7.25 |
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Email info@arrowmail.co.uk, call 0800 634 9870 or fill
out this webform for a free 1 month trial.
Smarthost Standby Service
So you're mail-server's sending out emails just fine at the moment, but wouldn't
you like some insurance in case it's suddenly blacklisted by one or more large
ISPs?
We can give you access to our smarthosts, either by username and password or by
anonymous access from your specific IP addresses, so that you can, at any time,
divert all your outgoing email, or just certain addresses, via our
smarthosts.
This standby service costs £2.95/month which allows you
to send up to 1000 emails for testing, maintenance, minor problems etc.
When you need to send more, we'll just invoice you monthly for the extra emails
at our standard rate.
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Ring Fence Your Mail-Server
What we mean by this is to throw a protective "wall" around your server in order to
keep it safe from all the "nasties" out there on the Internet
and make sure your outgoing emails get delivered reliably.
It's actually a combination of 4 of our services, detailed elsewhere on this
page:-
Smarthost
Anti-Virus
Spam Filter
Lost Email Protection
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Ring Fence your server: |
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Our Ring Fence service requires no equipment or software to be installed on your
server or your LAN.
These 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 all emails sent to your domain.
You do this by editing the DNS MX records for your domain as shown below:-
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We're happy to edit your DNS settings for you if you can let us know your domain
registrar control-panel logon details.
After changing your MX records, 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.
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2 - |
Configure your mail-server to use our servers to send all your
outgoing email.
If your mail-server is Microsoft Exchange, there are instructions for
configuring it to send all outgoing email using 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. |
Lost Email Protection
If your server or Internet connection fails, we'll hold all your incoming email
on our servers, indefinitely, until your server comes back on line when they'll
then be automatically forwarded on.
While your server is off-line we can send a copy of all incoming emails to an
external address, such a Gmail, so you can continue read incoming emails.
You can have up to 4 email domains covered by Lost Email Protection in our Ring Fence
package.
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.
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 Line 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 on your server so that one person at your organisation can
check for False Positives for all of your users. |
Spam that our servers have 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 and Backscatter emails are also trapped by our Spam
Filter.
Smarthost
All your outgoing emails are sent from your server to our SMTP servers which then
deliver 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.
Our Ring Fencing Package costs from £5.95/month. Full pricing details
here.
Email info@arrowmail.co.uk, call 0800 634 9870 or fill out
this webform for a free 1 month trial.
^ Top of Page ^
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These 4 services, combined with a
standard Exchange server, are all you need for a
reliable, professional business email system |
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Lost Email Protection
What will happen if your in-house mail-server or Internet connection stops working?
How much of an impact will the lack of access to your email have on your business?
If you don't have any backup mail-servers in place, when your primary
system fails there will be no way to access you
company email, as it will be sat in the retry queues of many different
mail-servers, all over the Internet and, after an hour or so, people who've sent
you emails will start to receive "Mail Undeliverable" messages, which is not
good for the reputation of your business!
To overcome this problem, you can edit the MX records for your email domain to
set our
mail-servers to be additional, lower-priority servers
responsible for receiving emails destined for your domain.
This means that, in normal operation, all your emails will continue to go straight to your server
but, if your server is off-line, your email will, instead, automatically
come to our servers. We'll then hold on to your incoming email, indefinitely, until
your server comes back on line when they'll be automatically forwarded-on to
your server. Additionally we can send a copy of the waiting emails to an
external address you nominate, such as Gmail.
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Lost Email Protection service: |
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If your company runs its own email system using a server located at your main
office then you're likely to have only a single MX record, such as shown below:-
If this server becomes unavailable there's nowhere for your emails to be
delivered!
You can add our 3 servers as lower priority MX
records, as shown below:-
When a mail-server is delivering an email, it first tries to send it to the
nominated receiving server with the highest priority
and, if this fails, tries the server with the next-highest priority and so on.
Priority, or preference, is a number between 0 and 99 and the lower the number,
the higher the priority.
It would be extremely unlikely that all 4 servers, in
the above example, are unavailable at the same time.
With your MX records setup as above, if your server or Internet connection ever
has a problem, our servers will be receiving your emails and attempting to
forward them on to your server every 15 minutes,
indefinitely, until your server comes back on-line.
We can also send
a copy of all the emails waiting on our backup servers to an external email
address that you nominate, such as a Gmail address, where you can then read the
emails that have been sent to you while your server's down.
When your server comes back on-line, all the originals of these emails will
still be delivered to your users' mailboxes. The only catch with this
is that, in the external mailbox, all your company's emails are lumped together
so, whoever is checking it, can read everyone's emails. You'll therefore have to
decide if you want this feature and who it's appropriate to allow to access this
external mailbox.
You also have access to our WebSend webpage which allows you
send emails that appear to originate from your normal company email address.
Have a look at this page here.
With forwarding to an external address and the WebSend page you can almost
operate as normal when your email system has failed.
When your server is operating normally, the occasional email will get sent to our backup
servers. These will be immediately sent on to your server without generating a
copy to the external address.
We're happy to create the appropriate
MX records for you if you can give us access to your DNS control panel.
Lost Email Protection costs £3.75/month for the first email domain and
£1.49/month for any additional domains you may have.
Email info@arrowmail.co.uk, call 0800 634 9870 or fill out
this webform for a free 1 month trial.
^ Top of Page ^
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Get Arrowmail's servers to
automatically collect, store and forward your company's email if your
system ever fails
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High Accuracy Spam Filtering
1,000,000,000 Spam Emails not Served
Telling the difference between spam and genuine email, a task so easy for a
human, is the hardest job our mail-servers have to perform.
Our
priority is always to minimise the number of false positives - genuine emails
labelled as spam - and to do this we employ a combination of all the latest spam
detection techniques.
This allows us to eliminate over 98% of spam while miss-classifying
as spam only a tiny percentage of genuine emails.
I doubt you'll find a better system.
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Spam Filtering service: |
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This does mean the odd spam message will make it into
your Inbox (some days are worse than others) but, more importantly, some genuine
emails will need rescuing from your Junk folder, a job only a human can do.
To take advantage of our anti-spam system you'll need to modify the MX records
for your email domain so that all incoming emails are routed via our servers
before being send on to your server. Your MX records should be set as shown below,
substituting your email domain for mycompany.com
There's more information on MX records here.
We're happy to create the appropriate MX records for you if you can give us
access to your DNS control panel.
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,
as shown below, 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 then
check, occasionally, for False Positives.
3 examples of modified Subject Lines are shown below:-
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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 your company's Probable Spam to go into one
mailbox on our servers, each email 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 into your user's Inboxes, as well as any
False Positives you find, 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.
Refusing to Accept Emails from Blacklisted Servers
95% of spam never makes it to our Spam Filtering system because the servers
trying to send them to us are on a blacklist and so we simply refuse to accept
emails from them.
Our servers actually tell the sending server there's "No such
user here" which is the best strategy to stop the server trying to resend the
spam.
The organisations that run these mail-server blacklisting services are very good
at it: a new rogue server can be listed within an hour, and a genuine server
that has been compromised but has now recovered can also be de-listed within an
hour.
Mail-servers aren't blacklisted by the country they're in, because they have a
dynamic IP address or an incorrect, or missing, Reverse DNS record, but
simply by being identified as having sent out spam and so this doesn't lead to
genuine emails being falsely identified as spam.
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 system where you can easily identify and recover false positives. |
3 - |
There's no need to subject new senders to 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 plus chewing up your Internet bandwidth. The
changed MX records will have sent them all away to our
servers to be dealt with. |
5 - |
Because of the way our anti-spam system works, you automatically get
Lost Email Protection included, detailed elsewhere on this
page. |
Our spam filter is very fast so the delay in routing emails via our servers
and then onto yours, instead of your server accepting emails directly is usually
no more than 1 minute.
We offer Anti-Spam filtering as part of our Ring Fence service.
Email info@arrowmail.co.uk, call 0800 634 9870 or fill out
this webform for a free 1 month trial.
^ Top of Page ^
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Anti-Virus
Every email that passes in and out of our mail-servers is virus-scanned.
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Anti-Virus service: |
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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 |
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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, DOCX,
XLS, XLSX 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-servers. EXE and MSI
files may be used legitimately to send software installation programs but it is
too risky to allow them to pass.
If you do want to send someone an EXE
file we advise that you put the EXE file inside a ZIP
file and attach the ZIP file or you could change the file
extension name to TXT
before you attach it and let the recipient know to rename it back to
EXE after 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
Remember that all commonly used file extensions are allowed to pass via our
mail-servers after virus scanning. This includes DOC, DOCX,
XLS, XLSX, PPT, PPTX and PDF.
We include virus-scanning as a free extra to all the services that involve
your emails passing in and out of 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
past our filters 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.
Anti-virus scanning comes free as part of our Ring Fence
service.
^ Top of Page ^
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Scanning for viruses off-site means
infected emails never get to your network |
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How Does the 1 Month Free Trial Period Work?
Just like you would expect it to.
You contact us, giving details of your company and let us know the service you
want to try out - a simple email will do, or you can use the web-form below.
Otherwise you can phone us and we'll be happy to discuss any aspect of our
services or charges.
We then go ahead and set up an account for you on our servers and, if necessary,
assist you in changing your MX records and making configuration changes to your
mail-server, email clients and maybe your firewall.
We aim to have your trial account setup and working within 2 hours of you
contacting us, during normal business hours.
All this without you making any form of payment or
commitment to us.
Towards the end of the trial period we'll email you to ask if you want to
continue using our services, and give you payment details.
If you do want to continue, make a payment to us and we'll leave things as they
are.
If you don't, we'll co-operate in setting your email system back to how it was
before the trial began without causing any disruption to your email service.
Email info@arrowmail.co.uk, call 0800 634 9870 or use the
web-form below to request a free trial of the services detailed on this page.
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© 2021 Arrowmail Ltd, a UK-registered company, number 4079706, registered VAT Number GB 895 0987 60
We welcome any comments about this website,
good or bad. Send them to webmaster@arrowmail.co.uk
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