Updated Email Forwarding Policy
June 30, 2010 – 12:29 pmWhen you have your DecaTech hosted domain’s email forwarded to an external email service like Yahoo!, Gmail or Comcast, your email comes into the DecaTech server, then is forwarded back out to your external email account.
We all receive SPAM on a daily basis. It is unfortunately unavoidable. However, many of the aforementioned email services above have gotten pretty good at blocking a large percentage of it. DecaTech has an email filtering service called SpamAssassin in place that we rely on to cut down on SPAM as well. This is provided for free to all of our clients that utilize email service with us. This service does 2 things – thru complex algorithms it analyzes the email and assigns a “score” to it to identify the liklihood of it being SPAM. The higher the score, the more likely that it is SPAM. We’ve found (and its recommended by SpamAssassin) that any email with a score over 7.00 is most likely SPAM. The second thing it can optionally do is automatically delete any email that has higher score than a specified value. This is before the email is passed on, but it is permanent – an email detected as SPAM and automatically deleted is not recoverable.
When we forward on all email from a DecaTech email account to an external service, we are invariably also passing on SPAM. This SPAM does not originate or have anything to do with DecaTech’s webserver, but to the external email service, it appears like DecaTech is sending SPAM! To avoid getting black-listed (which usually leads to getting blocked) by companies like Google, Yahoo!, and Comcast, we need to step up our efforts to not pass on SPAM, whenever and however it can be helped.
Thus, we reach the DecaTech Email policy change:
If you have us forward email from a DecaTech email account, we must enable the SpamAssassin feature that deletes all detected SPAM. If you have any concerns about false positives – you can have us bump up the SPAM score a bit, but to no more than 8.0. A false positive is where an email is incorrectly marked as SPAM. You can check on this process now in two ways – look for emails that we have marked in the subject line with “**SPAM** (<score>)” or look at your regular email header.
For example, in Gmail, when viewing a specific email, click on the down arrow next to the “Reply” button and choose “Show original”. Look for a line in the email headers that looks like this:
X-Spam-Status: No, score=0.4 required=7.8 tests=AWL,BAYES_00, FH_DATE_PAST_20XX,HTML_MESSAGE autolearn=no version=3.2.4
The score in this example is 0.4, which basically means that the likelihood that this particular email is SPAM is extremely low. You can also see that SpamAssassin was set to mark it as SPAM only if the value was higher than 7.8.
If you have any questions, or would like us to modify the SPAM detection value to something other than 7.0, please email DecaTech Support.