Spam Filtering Details

These next generation filters are easier to use than our previous filters. Before you call to request they be turned on, there are some things you need to know about how the filters work, and how we bill your account for them. Please keep reading.

The spam filters are $2.50 per month. It is however not on a per account basis as most will assume. It is on a per Megatron Email Box basis.

This will affect your bill in different ways depending on what other services you have with us.

How Is The Filtering Billed?

Example #1. You have 2 Megatron Email Addresses and want both filtered and you do not have any email aliases or domain email addresses with us.

In this example you will be billed $2.50 for each email address for a total of $5.00 per month for Spam Filtering.

Example #2. You have one Megatron Email Address, and several Domain Addresses for a domain we host for you. But all of those domain addresses point to the one Megatron email box.

In this example You would be billed for only one filtering charge.

Example #3. You have 2 domain email address and 2 Megatron email address. One domain address points to one of the Megatron addresses, and the other domain email address points to the other Megatron email address, and you want filtering turned on for all four addresses.

In this example you are billed for 2 filtering charges. Even though 4 addresses are being filtered, only 2 of those addresses have physical email boxes.

The reason as to why is that the filtering is charged based on the number of Physical Email Boxes the filtering effects. Domain Addresses and Aliases do not have a physical email box. The mail for these addresses are directed at a physical email box that is tied to a Megatron Email Address. Only Megatron Email Addresses have a physical email box. Megatron Aliases and Domain Email Addresses do not.

How Do I Turn On The Filtering?

You need to call us to turn them on. Filtering can not yet be activated from the website. Keep in mind that filtering with these new filters work at the address level. This means each email address is filtered separately. For instance if you have a Megatron alias or domain address that points to your Megatron email box and you turn on filtering for only the alias, then email arriving specifically destined for the alias address will be filtered, but email specifically addressed to the Megatron email that alias points to will not be filtered. So it is best filtering be activated for both the alias and the Megatron address it is redirected to. But because the alias and the Megatron email address are tied to one physical email box, you are only charged for one filtering account.

This per email address filtering has it's advantages and disadvantages. The disadvantage is filtering must be turned on separately for each address you want filtered. Each address also must be separately administered, and they have their own white lists and quarantine.

The advantage is it gives you complete control over what addresses are filtered. Those with domains will find that quite useful as it allows you to apply filtering to one of your domain addresses without it affecting your other addresses. The previous filters applied filtering during delivery to the mail box which meant that all domain addresses would be affected by filtering destined to one physical email box. These filters apply filter at arrival of the email before they are sent to the primary mail server for delivery to the physical mailbox. This allows for independent control over each and every address.

What do I need to do after they are turned on?

You will need to do two things.

1) Log into the filters control panel and setup your White List. You can log in here. The white list is a list of email addresses of your friends and family, or the addresses of anyone else you need to bypass the filters.

The filters use these white lists and some administrative black lists that we have created to automatically train the Bayesian filtering system. These self learning filters get better as time goes by.

2) Check your Quarantine on a regular basis. This is to make sure no legitimate email messages were marked as spam. These messages are placed in quarantine for 7 days on our servers to give you a chance to recover them. Once recovered, our system automatically will add the receiver to your white list. All future emails from that sender will then pass through the filters, and will also teach the Bayesian filters.

Each night all customers that have filtering turned on will receive a emailed message from our filtering system that contains a list of sender addresses that were quarantined during the course of the day. This serves two purposes. It reminds you that filters are active on your address. You would be surprised how many people using our past filters forgot that they were on. Second it gives you the opportunity to determine if you actually need to logon the filter system to recover any messages or not. This is intended to save you time.

This nightly email feature cannot be turned off. No option to turn them off is planed nor will we consider it. We feel it is a necessary step we must take based on support calls received during the use of our previous filters. We also do not consider those nightly emails to be spam or a nuisance. They can become annoying for those that have multiple aliases or domain addresses pointing to one email box because a nightly email is sent to each address that has filtering on. But each nightly email is specific for that email address, and necessary.

What Else Should I Know?

Those that have domains with us, and that domains email uses a catchall address then filtering cannot be activated for any domain address. A catchall address is a special domain address that redirects all email going to that domain regardless of the prefix to your Megatron email box. In other words *@mydomain.com  All addresses such as info@mydomain.com, support@mydomain.com. Ect. A catchall matches anything that is used for a prefix in front of the @ symbol of the address. When Megatron sets up a new domain, a cache all is configured by default. However, this filtering system will not function on cache all addresses. Therefore in order to provide filtering, the cache all must be converted to standard addresses. You will need to provide us with a list of domain email addresses you want or need to accept email for, and all others will be bounced back to the sender as unknown user. Once that is done, filtering can then be activated on any of those addressed you choose.

Megatron Data Systems cannot be held liable for any email you have lost by your voluntary use of these filters. By turning them on, you agree that filtering is dangerous and can, and sometimes does result in lost messages.

Most people know and understand this, others simply refuse to accept the fact that filtering software is not perfect and put their trust in a computers hands. Businesses should be aware that filtering should not be used on critical email addresses that where by any lost email will be devastating to the business. Do not put your trust in filtering software. It is not perfect. Mistakes and software malfunctions can occur at anytime.

For those recovering messages from the quarantine. Please note. Recovery is not instantaneous. The message may take up to 10 minutes to arrive in your inbox. And when it does, keep in mind that if your email client is set to sort email in date sorted order the message will appear in the list of messages that arrived for the date the message was quarantined, not the date your recovered it. Some of our customers during use of our last filters called to complain the email was not recovered and in most all cases this date sorting issue was the reason, and it was recovered and they simply did not see it. For this reason we mention it here so you will be aware of the issue, and watch for it.

Some email messages when being recovered will not be delivered. For example. Our inbound spam filtering gateway does not scan email messages for viruses, but the delivery server does. So if you should happen to attempt to recover a message that contains a virus, the recovery attempt will fail. During recovery, our spam filtering server will deliver the recovered email message to our primary mail server which handles final delivery of the messages. This server scans all emails prior to delivery for viruses, and will reject any that have viruses, or illegal attachments.

No notice is provided to you or the sender of virus infected emails, but notices of invalid attachments will be sent to either the sender, receiver or both. The reason virus notices are not sent is because 99% of all virus infected emails are sent with a fake address that prevent us from bouncing back the email. Many of those faked addresses actually belong to someone, but not the person who sent the virus. Bouncing back messages of that type will not only scare the other person, but will annoy them if their email address was used on hundreds of these. Which quite often happens. For this reason we were forced to shut off virus notifications to the sender many months ago. I believe the receiver may still receive a notice. But this cannot be guaranteed.

What if I have a question not answered here.

Feel free to call us 624-3002, or go online and ask your question in our new support forum http://forum.mtdata.com/forum . You can also try to email us. customerservice@mtdata.net

We would like to take a moment to apologize to anyone who has sent us email, and we did not respond. This is one of the reasons we are trying out the new support forum. Our support email address is slammed with hundreds of spam emails per day, and sometimes we miss some emails sent to us by our customers as they get lost in all the junk. Sometimes we cannot tell the good from the bad as many of our customers do not send email to us from their Megatron address but rather use a yahoo, or hotmail account instead. Those are not as easy for use to catch as these addresses are used quite often for spam, so many of those are over looked by us.