What is the MX-Defender?

OnlyMyEmail's Corporate MX-Defender is our first line defense against Spam, "Dictionary" and "Directory Harvesting" attacks.

The MX-Defender is only available for protecting Corporate clients at the domain level, as all inbound traffic is first directed through our MX Gateway filtering systems.

Because the MX-Defender blocks high-volume attacks from connecting to your systems, your servers (whether hosted, managed or owned) will be spared the unnecessary, and often overwhelming, load associated with such attacks.

While similar anti-spam firewalls exist, OnlyMyEmail's MX-Defender is unique in that it will not trigger false-positives because it is dynamically controlled by our spam filtering systems in real-time. As a result, the MX-Defender is only invoked when confirmed spam attacks are under way and then released shortly thereafter.

This approach means that your servers will be protected from mass-spammers, "open-relays" and even from hijacked "zombie" machines, but will then receive legitimate traffic from such compromised systems once the attack has run its course.

Once messages clear the MX-Defender they are then directed through OnlyMyEmail's 29 layers of proprietary filtering technology that represents the most accurate anti-spam system available today.

What Type Of Servers & Software Can We Use?

All of OnlyMyEmail's filtering systems run exclusively on our servers. Because of this, there are no compatibility issues with any known email server or client software programs.

Are There Domains OnlyMyEmail Cannot Filter?

In order to most effectively filter your domain with the Corporate MX-Defender, OnlyMyEmail's mail servers must be listed exclusively in the DNS MX records for you domain.

Many of the "cookie cutter" hosts use front-end software management consoles to run their systems and this generally means that their staff does not have the ability to perform any actions not supported by the push-button console.

In addition, the inbound email servers at these types of operations often do not actually know what domains they are hosting. In these cases, if the host's mail server doesn't "see itself" listed in the MX records it will assume that it is not hosting your email, and will then reject the filtered messages we try to deliver. Common examples of hosts with this type of management include the "shared hosting" plans at SBC Global, 1&1, XO and NoMonthlyFees.com, among others.

In order to use the Corporate MX-Defender you'll generally either need: (or be willing to upgrade to) a "Dedicated" or "Virtual Dedicated" server, or have a host with the technical capacity to manage their own severs, or have your own email server.

However, there are "workarounds" for these types of hosts, if you can get their Technical Support departments to assist:

1. Have the host register DNS "A" records for "yourdomain.yourhost.tld"

   Replace your existing MX entries with the new server name above, and

   Create a "CNAME" records for the above that point to the appropriate "mailfilter.onlymyemail.com." servers.

2. Alternatively, if your host doesn't understand DNS, then simply leave one of the host's email servers listed in the DNS MX but also:

   Assign the host's mail-server the "highest numeric value" preference number allowed, and

   Have the host restrict the mail-server (if they're capable) so that it will only accept messages for your domain when the connection is from our outbound servers.

Either of these workarounds will allow simplistic email hosting administration schemes to recognize your domain as their client, and to accept your mail from us once filtered.

Keep in mind, however, that hosts with mail-servers that rely on the DNS system to tell them who their clients are will very often lack the technical competence to implement even these straightforward workaround techniques.

Are There Any Storage Limits Or Filtering Quotas?

Because the MX-Defender delivers your filtered email to your existing mail servers your messages are not stored on our systems. As a result, there is no "disk quota" or any other limits on the amount of email passing through our filters for your account.

What Happens To Our Email If Our Servers Are Down?

In the event that your email servers (or your host) cannot be reached for any reason, OnlyMyEmail will continue to accept and filter your email, and will hold your email for delivery until your systems can be reached. There is no action required on your part to enable this feature; the spooling and subsequent delivery will occur automatically.

Senders will not receive bounce notifications, so they will never know that your servers were unavailable. Additionally, you may provide us with the names & addresses of any other servers where you would like your messages delivered when your primary systems cannot accept mail.

How Do End-Users Allow Or Block Specific Addresses?

In addition to the "global" Allow and block lists that the administer can maintain, the system also remembers sender preferences on a "per-user" basis.

Individual sender preferences are developed based on the emails each end-user chooses to either "Resend" or "Report as Spam" and thus require no manual administration.

How Do We Retrieve Messages OnlyMyEmail Has Removed?

Email that is deleted as Spam (or any other category you've chosen to block) is placed in a deleted mail folder and held on our servers for 7 days.

Administrators can review these messages through the "View Deleted Email" menu in the Support site. You can (and really should) enable the automatic sending of daily "SpamReports" to each of your email addresses so that your end-users may receive these reports directly.

Additionally, your end-users can generate SpamReports in real-time by simply submitting their email address through a "SpamReports On-Demad" page that is available only to MX-Defender clients.

Regardless of which method is being used the "Subject:" of each message displayed is a hyper-link that can be used to open a copy of the original. Included in the display of this copy is a "Resend" button which will re-deliver the original email to original destination address.

Once the resend is confirmed, users will be presented with the option of specifying whether future emails from that sender should be delivered.

This functionality means that while you may review and resend emails for any user, each user may also review the deleted email for just their address. More importantly, when an end-user specifies that certain senders should be allowed to deliver email to them in the future, this will not directly affect other users within your account.

How Much Delay Does The Filtering Add?

After the first week or two of use (during which the system is learning and adapting to your domain's unique mix of email) OnlyMyEmail's Corporate MX-Defender will create an average latency of between 12 to 20 seconds. If you are experiencing delays greater than this, then visit the "Problems & Solutions" menu within the Support site for troubleshooting advice.

Do We Have To Filter All Accounts & Aliases?

There are two separate lists of addresses within the MX-Defender for each domain, both managed from the Email Accounts menu within the Support site.

1. Filtered - The list of your addresses that you want us to filter.
2. Not Filtered - Addresses for which you want us to accept mail, and to then deliver to your servers without passing through our spam and virus filters.

The two lists combined must total all of your valid and deliverable addresses, whether they resolve to unique mailboxes or are aliases and/or forwarders.

Note, the distribution of addresses between the two lists does not affect your billing, which is based on the total number of addresses for which we must carry traffic.

Additionally, because our Directory Harvest, Dictionary Attack and Zombie Machine defenses operate at the SMTP level, all addresses (whether content filtered or not) will benefit by a substantial reduction in spam.

How Do We Report Spam That Still Reaches Our End-Users?

There are two options for reporting spam email that has penetrated through our filters.

1. The preferred option is to simply enable the "Spam Submission" option from within the Preferences menu for your account. This will authorize us to insert a "spam reporting" hyper-link into your inbound messages enabling end-users to "point and click" for reporting spam.

This feature not only provides real-time feedback to our filtering systems, but it also relieves your IT staff from the burden of having to manage spam submission complaints.

2. Alternatively, you may always make spam submissions to us via email, as long as you include the entire Internet Delivery Headers along with the offending email.
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How Does OnlyMyEmail Protect Our Email Privacy?

At OnlyMyEmail, we understand that the privacy and security of your email is of the highest importance to our clients and there are a number of features and security practices in place to protect the privacy of your correspondence.

1. First of all, the only emails we retain on our systems are those that are Spam or viruses and other categories you have specifically chosen to block. Otherwise, the Corporate MX-Defender simply filters your inbound email and then continues to deliver the legitimate messages to your existing email servers.
2. Filtered emails kept on our servers are only held so that you may resend any emails that we should not have blocked, and these are purged after 7 days (168 hours).
3. All of our servers use SSL for our MX Defender SMTP communications.
4. The internal servers that analyze email (and that store your Spam) are not accessible from the Internet or exposed to external access in any way.
5. All emails we receive are decomposed into objects that cannot be readily viewed as email, but only interpreted through database access, and none of our databases servers are exposed to the Internet.
6. We do not have access to any of your outbound emails, as we only filter inbound messages.
7. As for the potential of an OnlyMyEmail employee reviewing your messages, we're only as secure as the people we hire. That said, even if an employee were interested, motivated and technically proficient it would still be nearly impossible to review your mail.

   Realize that currently less than 5% of our inbound email traffic is deliverable (meaning the rest is spam, directory harvest and dictionary attacks) so finding any legitimate mail as it passes through our systems would be exceptionally difficult. This is especially true as there is no one fixed path or one specific server that would have to be accessed as many servers operate in parallel.

   Picking out one specific domain or address from the 5% of legitimate traffic while it flows across multiple servers in real-time would likely exceed the capabilities of anyone inside or outside of our network.

   Combined with the database model of managing our decomposed email objects, the chance of anyone inside or outside of our systems accessing your email is improbable, to say the very least.

However, if you are not comfortable with our standard policies and reputation, we do offer data-encryption service that will encrypt all of your communications (including spam) though every part of our system. The surcharge for this option is rather significant as it is based on a per message cost (including spam) of $0.0075 cents.

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Do We Still Need Anti-Virus Software On Our Systems?

While OnlyMyEmail will prevent viruses from reaching your servers through email, there are still several other vectors for infection including: web sites, instant messaging, Wi-Fi and LAN connections and/or intrusion through open ports.

This being the case, you should consider OnlyMyEmail's services as a first-step in virus protection, and not a replacement for running anti-virus applications on your network.

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