Web Wiz Network Status and Announcements

During June and July we saw a rise in reports about our spam filtering, both spam getting through and legitimate email being wrongly filtered. Since the end of July we have been rebuilding it, and that work is now complete and running in production.

What You Will See
Suspected spam that is delivered to your Inbox is now marked at two levels instead of one:

** SPAM LOW ** - some spam characteristics
** SPAM MEDIUM ** - stronger spam characteristics

Messages we are confident about still go to your Junk Email folder, with no marker. Which messages get filtered has not changed, only how clearly the warnings are labelled.

What Has Changed Behind the Scenes
We have replaced two third party spam engines with a new platform built on Rspamd, an open source filtering engine running on our own infrastructure. We have added reputation feeds from Abusix and Spam Eating Monkey, retired a block list that was no longer earning its place, and reweighted the rest against several weeks of our own mail traffic.

We also check the quality of what our filters learn from. When someone marks a message as junk, or moves one out of Junk, that decision is reviewed by AI before it trains the filters, so one person's preferences do not affect everyone else. Mail from banks, government services and well known retailers is protected from being wrongly learned as junk altogether. None of this affects delivery or filtering, only training.

The result is fewer legitimate emails being wrongly filtered, while genuine spam continues to be caught.

What You Need to Do
Nothing. If you would prefer marked messages to go straight to Junk, you can set up a content filter in Webmail, or open a support ticket and we will help.

Reminder: SSL/TLS Required from 1st September 2026
From 1st September 2026 our shared hosting mail servers will no longer accept unencrypted connections. Most modern email clients already use SSL/TLS and need no changes, but please check yours before then. Full details, including the settings needed for Classic ASP CDOSYS: Shared Hosting Mail - SSL/TLS Required from 1st Sept 2026

Need Help?
If you have questions, or believe a legitimate email has been wrongly filtered, please open a support ticket. Reports of wrongly filtered mail genuinely help us improve the filtering for everyone.

We are a small team, and like most people we like to make the most of the summer. Our staff will be taking annual leave across two short periods this August, so we will be running an out of hours support service on these dates:

Wednesday 12th to Tuesday 18th August
Thursday 27th to Monday 31st August, covering the bank holiday weekend

Your servers, websites and email carry on exactly as normal, and monitoring of the network and data centre continues 24 hours a day. Anything that takes a service offline is responded to in the usual way, day or night.

Support tickets will still be picked up and answered on these dates, but replies may take a little longer than usual. In most cases you will still hear back from us the same day. Normal service runs either side, including the whole of the 19th to the 26th of August, so if you have a job coming up that needs our involvement, such as a migration, DNS changes or a server upgrade, it is worth getting it booked in around these dates.

Normal service resumes on Tuesday 1st September. From all of us here at Web Wiz, we hope you have a lovely summer.

At Web Wiz, we are committed to keeping our shared hosting mail platform secure for every customer. As part of this commitment, we are disabling plain-text (non-SSL/TLS) connections to our shared hosting mail servers.

What is Changing?
From 1st September 2026, our shared hosting mail servers will no longer accept unencrypted connections. Every connection - IMAP, POP and SMTP - must be secured with SSL/TLS or STARTTLS. We support the modern, secure protocols TLS 1.2 and TLS 1.3, so your mail is fully protected in transit. The mail server ports are not changing; only unencrypted sessions on those ports will be refused.

This change affects how you connect to send and collect your own mail. It does not affect normal delivery of incoming mail from other senders, which continues as usual.

Why is this happening?
We are seeing a high volume of brute-force login attempts against mail accounts, the majority of which target plain-text connections. In this day and age there is no reason to send your email username and password unencrypted across the internet. By requiring SSL/TLS on every connection we significantly reduce the attack surface and better protect your mailbox credentials.

What You Need to Do
Most modern email clients, such as Outlook, use SSL/TLS by default, so many customers will need to do nothing. This includes MAPI and EWS connections, which are already secure. If you connect using older or manually configured settings, please check your email client before 1st September and make sure it is set to use an encrypted connection. The correct host names and ports are listed here: Email Settings (IMAP, POP, SMTP, EWS, MAPI & CalDAV)

If you use Webmail, there is nothing to do - Webmail already runs over a secure HTTPS connection.

Sending Mail from Classic ASP (CDOSYS)
If your website sends email using Classic ASP CDOSYS, please be aware of an important point. CDOSYS has a long-standing bug in its STARTTLS handling: when configured for the STARTTLS port (587), it can send the connection in plain text rather than upgrading it to an encrypted session. Once unencrypted connections are disabled, scripts relying on this will fail to send mail. To avoid any disruption, CDOSYS scripts must use the explicit SSL port 465 with SSL enabled. A full working example is available here: Sending Mail Using Classic ASP CDOSYS

Need Help?
If you need help reconfiguring your email client or updating your scripts, please open a support ticket and our team will be happy to assist.

We appreciate your cooperation in helping us keep our shared hosting mail platform - and your data - secure.

At Web Wiz we are always working to improve our email platform. We are pleased to announce that our hosted mailboxes now fully support MAPI and EWS (Exchange Web Services), giving you a complete Exchange-style experience – your email, calendar, contacts, tasks and notes all kept in sync across your devices.

What this means for you

• MAPI provides a native connection for classic Microsoft Outlook on Windows (Outlook 2016, 2019, 2021 and the Microsoft 365 desktop app).
  
• EWS provides the same experience for Outlook for Mac and Apple Mail.
  
• We particularly recommend eM Client – a fast, modern app for Windows, macOS, iOS and Android, and an excellent replacement for Microsoft Outlook. Your mailbox qualifies for a free eM Client Pro licence for up to 3 devices (just open a support ticket and we will issue your activation).

Setup guides

• Configuring Email with eM Client
• Configuring MAPI in Microsoft Outlook
• Configuring EWS Email in Outlook for Mac & Apple Mail

Enterprise-grade email as standard

• Every Web Wiz mailbox now provides functionality comparable to Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft 365, backed by our own resilient UK infrastructure:
  
• Full Exchange-style sync – email, calendar, contacts, tasks and notes, kept in sync across all your devices via MAPI and EWS.
  
• Free eM Client Pro licence – for up to 3 devices, across Windows, macOS, iOS and Android.
  
• Premium spam filtering – every mailbox is protected by Cyren and Message Sniffer, premium filtering add-ons for SmarterMail, on both inbound and outbound mail.
  
• High availability – our mail servers are mirrored to redundant hardware so your email stays online.
  
• Daily backups, onsite and offsite – your mail is backed up every day and held both onsite and offsite in fire- and waterproof storage pods. Unlike Microsoft 365, which operates a shared-responsibility model and does not provide traditional backups of your mailbox data, this protection is included as standard.

How our email compares to Microsoft 365
You get the email features businesses rely on from Microsoft Exchange – plus daily backups Microsoft do not include – at a fraction of the price.

                                                                                                                                               

Feature	Web Wiz Hosted Email	Microsoft 365 Business Basic
Full Exchange-style sync (email, calendar, contacts, tasks, notes)	Yes	Yes
Works with Outlook, Apple Mail, eM Client and mobile	Yes	Yes
Free desktop email client licence	Yes – eM Client Pro, up to 3 devices	No – desktop Outlook requires a higher plan
Premium spam & virus filtering	Yes – Cyren & Message Sniffer	Yes – Exchange Online Protection
Mail servers mirrored to redundant hardware	Yes	Yes
Daily backups, stored onsite & offsite	Yes – included as standard	No – shared-responsibility model, not included
Direct support from the team that hosts your mailbox	Yes	Via Microsoft or your IT provider
Price per mailbox / user, per month	from £0.35	from £5.75*

*Microsoft 365 Business Basic, UK list price from 1 July 2026 – £5.75 per user/month on an annual commitment; month-to-month billing costs more. Excludes VAT.

Email pricing changes
To support the significant new functionality above, and to cover the ongoing cost of keeping our mail platform secure and our outbound sending reputation clean, we are updating our email pricing, giving at least 30 days’ notice in line with our Terms and Conditions. Because you are on monthly billing, the new rates will apply on your next renewal date after 14th July 2026, and will not affect any period you have already paid for. If you do not wish to continue a service at the new price, you may cancel it before the change takes effect.

                                                               

Item	Old Price	New Price
Mailboxes	£0.25 per month	£0.35 per month
Email Forwarders	£0.01 per month	£0.05 per month
Mail Groups	£0.45 per month	£0.75 per month

The mailbox increase reflects the significantly enhanced service now included with every mailbox, as outlined above – full Exchange-style sync, premium filtering, mirrored servers and daily onsite and offsite backups.

Why are forwarding and mail groups increasing?
Forwarded and group mail is very often sent on to third-party providers such as Gmail, Outlook.com and others. To stop forwarded spam and viruses from reaching those providers – which can cause our mail servers to be blacklisted and damage email deliverability for every customer on the platform – every forwarded message is processed through our outbound spam and virus filtering (Cyren and Message Sniffer). The filtering required to do this safely costs us at least £0.04 per forwarder, and a mail group multiplies that cost across every recipient it delivers to, so the new prices barely cover the cost of keeping this mail clean and protecting our sending reputation on your behalf.

All prices exclude VAT.

If you have any questions about these changes, please open a support ticket and we will be happy to help. Thank you for your continued custom.

We have been informed of pricing increases. The dates of the price increases along with the new prices are listed below.

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