E-mail content filtering of outboud mail from web servers

Email generated from scripts or forms on web sites pass through anti-spam content filters prior to delivery. This is to ensure that we are able to deliver your mail, not to restrict your ability to send.

A common question that people ask when their messages are being caught by our spam filters is can we lower the score for a particular filtering rule.

The answer is no. We use a popular set of anti-spam rules for our content filtering. What that means is that a great many other providers are using these exact same sets of rules. If we lower our scores, then your messages may get sent, but then are going to get blocked by recipients' spam filters. Too many blocked messages will result in mail from accounts on the server your site is on getting banned entirely by those recipients' mail providers. If that happens, there is nothing hostek.com can do to get the recipient to accept your mail.

Again, it should be stressed that the purpose of the content filters are to ensure our ability to deliver your mail, not to restrict you from sending it.

If you have messages being caught by the spam filters, that does mean you will need to alter the format or the content of your message.

Many of the rules are looking for poorly formatted mail messages (a common characteristic of spam), such as missing header information, no HTML tags for an HTML body, etc. These formatting issues should be corrected whether the messages were being blocked by our spam filters or not. Again, when you have poor formatting of your mail messages, you are sending mail with characteristics similar to those of known spammers. You do not want this.

You have to remember that you are sending mail from an account on a shared server. That means there are many other people sending mail from the same server. Within the scope of the mail volume you send, any one rule may seem insignificant. But when you figure in all the possible senders going through the same content filter as your mail, it adds up very quickly.

Another common question when mail is being caught by the content filters is their domain/sender account can be whitelisted so that they are not scanned at all.

Unfortunately, we are not able to do this for accounts on shared servers. The sender domain is too easily forged. A spammer can specify any sender address they like and bypass the content filters.

Q - If I do not want mail generated from web forms/scripts to be scanned by content filters prior to delivery, what are my options?

You can move your site to a VPS. Having your own server will mean that you have complete control over the delivery of your mail. We have many affordable VPS options located here.