Email changes: Attachment Size, Spam Filtering

This past week we made a couple improvements on our email systems that we think will be be better for everyone.

First, we changed the maximum email attachment size to twenty megabytes. This is more in line with other large email providers and will help some of our graphic designer and photographer customers send and receive the large files associated with their trade. Remote recipients might not be able to receive 20MB attachments sent through our system (since their email provider might have a different policy), but incoming attachments should come through just fine as long as they can make it through our dangerous content filters.

Second, all newly created mailboxes will have their spam filter turned on, and anything detected as spam will be placed in the Spam/ subfolder of the mailbox. Note that messages in the Spam/ and Trash/ folders are auto-deleted after a period of time.

We're committed to offering maximum control over your incoming messages and had to think hard about enabling the filter by default. But two things gave us confidence: a relatively commonly expressed concern from new customers that since transferring to Modwest, they seem to receive more spam, and the (directly related) discovery that the majority of our customers had not chosen to enable spam filtering at all. So this change should help with that phenomenon. Existing mailboxes are not affected by this change.

Questions? Comment below, or contact our support team.

-JM

Comments

[Keith Robinson]

This is good news, John. I for one welcome the spam filter being turned on by default. As a reseller setting up mailboxes for clients, I get tired of going in and switching it on myself, or advising the client to do it -- they just never bother.

I've used the "normal" spam filter mode for years and it works great. I long ago stopped checking through spam -- why bother having a spam filter if you're going to check through the junk mail anyway? -- so I trust that it's doing its job and have it deleted automatically.

The file attachment is also a nice improvement in some ways, but could be a pain in others. I actually don't mind telling people NOT to email me gigantic images when they're just for website use. I'd rather they were forced to learn what's oversize and what's not.

I usually ask clients to send extra large attachments via YouSendIt.com, so I can download them when it suits me. If there's apparently no limitation when sending images straight out of a 5 megapixel digital camera, they'll never bother to learn and the internet will get more and more clogged up with unnecessarily enormous file attachments.

[Lyndi Petersen]

saltStudio is a Missoula-based advertising and design agency with national reach. Our clients range from small non-profit organizations to national companies and our capabilities include strategic branding, graphic identity, web design and development and advertising (print, radio, television and alternative).