Customer Concerns - am I getting all of the email

[garydumbleton]

Hello,

I have some customers with some concerns that they may not be getting all of their email, however they are very pleased with the lack of spam and are willing to be patient while this is fine tuned.

I have left all settings to default. I have some questions though.

1. Is default the best settings.
2. If I were to back off the protection somewhat, what would be the procedure for doing this.

Thanks in advance for your answers.

Gary

[magicspam]

Hello Gary,

Thank you for your post. We are happy to hear that your customers are pleased with spam protection, but of course wish to address any reports of 'false positive' hits.

The default settings as shipped with MagicSpam are normally recommended as we have found them to be the best 'over all' combination of rules in public deployments. However, we do understand that there are exceptions to every rule.

A good place to start with examining your specific case would be to determine the rules in question that are being triggered for those reported cases. If you have a couple of example 'from/to' combinations, then you can use the log search utility from the Dashboard page of the interface. The rule itself should be listed. If you find a 'common' rule that is being triggered that in turn is not effective in blocking spam, then you can of course try turning the rule, or individual IP reputation block list off. The two tabs: Best Practice Policies and IP Reputation Lists provide a simple to use interface for facilitating this, along with links to detailed information as to what the rule enforces or the individual list policies are.

If however you find cases where turning off a specific rule (for example: dynamic_reverse_dns) would likely compromise the spam protection, but still need to permit emails from the misconfigured server in question, then you can also look at using the Exemption Lists. The lists themselves permit "from" address exemptions, From IP address exemptions, and also recipient address exemptions if you have individual mailboxes you host that should *not* receive spam protection.

We hope this information helps. We are aware that often in new geographical region deployments (ie: SMTP Best Practices have not been followed) that there is a period during which adjustment of individual rules and/or education may be required.