Ten years ago, spam and viruses were rare.  Things have changed.

Today, less than 1% of the email that we process is legitimate.  The rest is:
  • SPAM - unsolicited junkmail, advertising everything from mortgages to pills.
  • PHISHING - junkmail that appears to come from a place you trust, like eBay, your bank, or your credit card company, but which is designed to take you to a trojan web site where you'll be persuaded to enter your credit card information, bank passwords, social security number, etc., after which you'll quickly become the victim of identity theft.
  • VIRUSES - messages that contain programs that, if run on your computer, will give the bad guys a back door through which they can steal your private information or send spam from your computer.
Here's a chart that shows a typical hour of incoming mail to just one of our mail servers.  The orange line shows the flood of spam, phishing email and viruses that attempted to get in.  The lines at the bottom of the chart, which you can barely see because they're so small compared to the junkmail, are the messages that were either delivered or quarantined as probable spam that managed to get through the first-level filters:

Blocked SPAM

For domains that have been around for a few years, the ratio of spam and virus traffic to real mail often exceeds 400:1.  We've seen peaks of more than 1000:1

These days, without spam and virus filtering, email would be not only useless (you'd never find your real mail among the junk), but dangerous.

Blocking spam is trickier than it seems, not only because of the sheer volume of spam/phishing/virus email today, but because the spammers are highly motivated and clever, and do everything they can to make their junk look like legitimate mail.  They're constantly changing their tactics, and as a result we're constantly changing ours, often hour by hour.

We've perfected techniques that block nearly all spam/virus/phishing traffic without accidentally blocking legitimate mail, and without delaying the flow of mail.  Typical delivery time on our servers is less than 5 seconds, vs. hours on many other providers' systems.

All email accounts that we provide come with spam/phishing/virus blocking.  If we host your email, you'll get your mail within seconds and without worries that you'll lose legitimate mail.