Anti-Spam and Anti-virus Services

ActivSupport spam filtering and virus scanning services are well suited for small businesses with an in-house email server. ActivSupport email security consulting team handles the setup of your solution from our offices and without any modification to your in-house network systems. In fact, we re-route your incoming emails through our servers prior to either forwarding cleaned up and valid messages directly to your mailbox, or quarantining suspect communications to your individual web based quarantine. Our email SPAM filtering and email virus scanning services are priced very reasonably on a per user fee structure, and without any minimum fee.

In addition to our email SPAM filtering and email virus scanning services, customers can subscribe to ActivSupport email business continuity solution for a small additional fee. This component makes email available neatly arranged in individual user mailbox basis through an ubiquituous web based interface. In the event your in-house email server becomes unavailable, and contrary to all other available commercial services you users can still access their historical email as well as sending and receiving emails through a web based interface. Contact us here for more information or read our FAQ below about our Email SPAM filtering services and Email virus scanning services.

Does the service allow me to use my primary domain name?
What in-house Mail-Servers does the service work with?
If our in-house mail server is unavailable will the mail bounce or will it be queued?
Can we decide to have hot-standby accounts for some but not all of our users?
How do I keep my mail-server's account list synchronized with my hot-standby accounts?
Can I set different retention periods for different groups of employees?
How does email sent from my e-mail server end up in the sent folder of the appropriate mirrored Webmail account?
If our mail server is unavailable and our employees are using the hot-standby Webmail accounts, what happens to the email they have been sending out when our server comes back online?
In the event of an emergency whom do we call and what happens if our email administrator is not able to monitor and manage the outage?
It is vital we have access to our business continuity plan during an emergency; can you suggest an easy way for all our employees to have electronic access to it?
Tight scheduling and a central calendar will be incredibly important if we ever have the need to work our way out of a disaster. Do you have something like this?
We have a problem with viruses and spam clogging up our mail server, how can you help us with this?
We are concerned about relaying our corporate email through your servers for security reasons. Couldn't you read our email?
How will internal Exchange email be available during an outage when it is never relayed through ActivSupport's servers?

1. Does the service allow me to use my primary domain name? Yes. Users simply login to Webmail from any Internet connected computer in the world using their existing corporate email account name and a password that has been setup by the administrator. All mail sent to and from this standby account will retain the corporate identity and the outside world will never know that the primary email system is temporarily off-line. Back to FAQ
2. What in-house Mail-Servers does the service work with? Microsoft-Mail, Microsoft Exchange, Lotus CC-Mail, IBM/Lotus Notes, Novell Group-wise. You name the version, we can work with it. Our inter-connect options also allow the seamless consolidation of disparate mail systems and tricky configurations involving multiple domain names and branch offices. Back to FAQ
3. If our in-house mail server is unavailable will the mail bounce or will it be queued? If your server is no longer accepting mail for any reason then our system will queue the mail automatically for up to seven days, attempting re-delivery at regular intervals. Special arrangements can be made for longer outages. The key thing during an outage is that you will still be able to access your email inbox via a web interface. When your server comes back on line you will receive delivery of every piece of email you had been sent during the outage. You will bounce no email. Back to FAQ
4. Can we decide to have hot-standby accounts for some but not all of our users? Yes. We can setup our system so that only the accounts you specify will have an associated backup Webmail account. If mail arrives for an account not in our system then you can still have it forwarded to your mail server. Optionally you can also bounce or delete the mail. This allows you the flexibility for paying only for the accounts you really need. Having said this most of our clients choose to have hot-standby accounts for all their valid email accounts. Note: The SMTP relay service is required for all users in a domain even if you choose to only give Business Continuity accounts to select users. Back to FAQ
5. How do I keep my mail-server's account list synchronized with my hot-standby accounts? If you have a significant number of employees then we acknowledge that it might be a significant challenge to manually create and delete accounts on an ongoing basis in our Messaging Maestro Administrator. If your mail server supports LDAP queries we can automate the synchronization of your account list so that the system maintains itself. When you first set the service up we will import your account list for you as a starting point. Back to FAQ
6. Can I set different retention periods for different groups of employees? Yes. The Messaging Maestro Administrator allows you to create preference groups and then apply those preference groups to specific mailboxes. This allows you to set different retention periods for different groups of mailboxes. You just tell the system after how many days you wish to auto-delete mail out of the web accounts. As an example; you may wish to never delete your Executive's email but may decide that more junior employees merit only 30 days worth of retention. Back to FAQ
7. How does email sent from my e-mail server end up in the sent folder of the appropriate mirrored Webmail account? If you wish we add you to what we call our "outbound relay service." You simply configure your mail server to relay sent mail out through us. Any sent mail will be intercepted by our system and placed in the sent folder of the appropriate standby Webmail account on our system. If our system does not find the account on our system then the email will be ignored but still sent on to its destination. Back to FAQ
8. If our mail server is unavailable and our employees are using the hot-standby Webmail accounts, what happens to the email they have been sending out when our server comes back online? We have a couple of options for this. Employees can blind carbon copy important sent emails back to themselves. This will put the email in the queue to be delivered when your email server comes back online. Alternatively when the server comes online they can log back into the Webmail account and go into the sent folder and re-direct any important emails to their own email address which will achieve the same result as the first option mentioned above.
   For extended outages we could possibly synchronize the Webmail accounts back to your mail-server for an additional fee. The key thing to remember is that the worst that can happen is that you will have to re-manage your account's inbox when it comes available. This is much more palatable knowing that you have not lost a single piece of email during your outage. Back to FAQ
9. In the event of an emergency whom do we call and what happens if our email administrator is not able to monitor and manage the outage? All of our Business Continuity customers are given access to our priority 24X7 support number so that we can be reached in any emergency. We suggest you designate and train more than one contact in your company to have access and know how to use the Messaging Maestro Administrator. We also suggest that you print this emergency phone number in your business continuity plan so that even if your administrator is not available to reach us, someone from your company can. In this situation we can act as your administrator until such time as it makes sense to hand the responsibility back to someone in your company.Back to FAQ
10. It is vital we have access to our business continuity plan during an emergency; can you suggest an easy way for all our employees to have electronic access to it? All your Webmail accounts can be setup to have access to a shared mailbox where a copy of your business continuity plan can be stored. In the event of an emergency your users simply login to their account and access this shared mailbox where an email containing an attachment that is your plan will be available to them. You can also use this shared mailbox to post other information as your continuity plan kicks into action. Back to FAQ
11. Tight scheduling and a central calendar will be incredibly important if we ever have the need to work our way out of a disaster. Do you have something like this? For a small additional monthly fee we can activate the shared calendar and group scheduling service within Webmail. If you ever have the need you can have a central calendar available that can be administered by some or all of your employees. Group scheduling functionality will allow you to quickly and effectively organize meetings as well. Back to FAQ
12. We have a problem with viruses and spam clogging up our mail server, how can you help us with this? Our spam filtering and virus scanning services can be added at any time to your service package. Our virus scanning service will eliminate all viruses from ever reaching your mail server. Our spam filtering service has proven to eliminate about 80% of spam and as an added benefit it will reduce your storage and bandwidth charges. Other services such as message filtering and mailing list services can also be added. Back to FAQ
13. We are concerned about relaying our corporate email through your servers for security reasons. Couldn't you read our email? As a trusted email partner with an eight plus year history of providing services to Government Agencies and Fortune 500 companies, we wouldn't be in business if we weren't trustworthy and didn't have a secure data center and tight security measures in place. ActivSupport also contracts to confidentiality in our standard service agreement. While technically it would be possible for us to read your corporate email, we quite frankly don't have the time or the interest to read any of the millions of messages we manage per day on behalf of our customers. We invite any of our potential or current customers to tour our data center should they wish to see where their data will be stored. At the user-level, SSL encryption is available to secure access to the web-based standby accounts so that security is not compromised in any way. Back to FAQ
14. How will internal Exchange email be available during an outage when it is never relayed through ActivSupport's servers? To keep bandwidth usage low, pricing low and the complexity of the business continuity service low, the service stores inbound and outbound Internet email only. This means that with our basic service email that is sent within your company (which never leaves your Exchange environment), will not be available during an outage. Typically this has not been a problem for customers because they are most concerned about communicating with their customers and suppliers during an outage and they will have this external email available. If you must store all email then there is a solution.
    For an extra setup fee it is possible to also keep copies of both internal and external email available via Webmail login. To achieve this you enable the archiving feature of your Exchange server to send a copy of all your company's email to an external email account provided by ActivSupport. This account will have special processing applied to it to determine if the mail is internal (which has not been stored already), and then it will move each message to the appropriate user's account. The important consideration for choosing this extra level of redundancy is that bandwidth charges will be greatly increased along with extra storage costs to store this additional email. Back to FAQ

ActivSupport delivers consulting and outsourcing services across Microsoft, Linux, and Cisco networks to small businesses and enterprises alike all over the U.S. For a free consultation, call ActivSupport at 1-877-ACTIVNET (1-877-228-4863) or use our online contact form.