Improved Spam Filtering for Shared Hosting Mail

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.