1) You will soon be getting more spam in your exmsft.com email account.
2) Forwarders you’ve set up manually may stop working.
What’s happening
I’ve been informed by my hosting company that the front-end spam filter we’ve been using for some time is being discontinued in January 2018. There is no equivalent replacement planned. (They’re moving their clients to a hosted email and spam solution, which is quite cost prohibitive for exmsft.com.)
Currently we have two-stages of spam filtering before email reaches your exmsft.com inbox:
- This host-provided filter before email reaches the exmsft.com server.
- SpamAssassin running on the server.
After the first part of the year we’ll be left with only SpamAssassin. While SpamAssassin is free, it’s also fairly error prone on the false-positive side so I’ve had to turn down its aggressiveness to avoid people losing legitimate emails. We do not have per-account settings in this regard.
The effect of more spam on your quota
Most detected spam is placed into a folder in your account on the server. Depending on your mail program and configuration you may or may not see that, or may need to login to webmail to see it. Spam older than 14 days is automatically deleted.
The published maximum amount of email you can keep on the server — your quota — is 50 megabytes. Unfortunately spam counts.
My goal is that increased spam will not cause you to max out your quota. I’ve already bumped several accounts to 100MB to see if they’ll stabilize under that in that 14 day window. (i.e. they get less than 100MB of spam in 14 days.) If I see that spam is accumulating at a rate higher than that I may bump some quotas higher. If things get really excessive … well, I’m not sure what’ll happen yet.
Forwarders
Exmsft.com no longer officially provides email forwarding, though I know that a handful of people have taken advantage of the interface that allows them to set up their own.
These forwarders will almost certainly be removed.
The problem is that forwarders forward spam. That means that to the destination is looks like exmsft.com is sending spam. The results in the entire server getting blocked by the recipient mail service, meaning no one can send to those domains. That’s unacceptable.
Suggestions?
I’m happy to hear them, but I’d respectfully request you check out the FAQ: exmsft.com hosting alternatives page first.