Spam Filtering Frequently Asked Questions about VirusGator

What is VirusGator?
VirusGator is a service. Our spam filtering service operates on the mail server for your domain. This means you must own the domain which you receive mail at and have the ability to update your DNS settings in order to use our service. Unlike most spam filtering systems our spam filter prevents spam and objectionable mail from initially reaching your mail server. This prevents your mail server from becoming overloaded as well as prevents your client workstations from receiving objectionable messages.

How does it work?
In simple terms of our spam filtering service works by placing our spam filter mail cluster system directly in front of your normal mail server. We do this by updating your DNS settings for your mail exchanger. How it works is explained in detail here.

What do I need to install?
You do not need to install any software for Make any changes to your existing mail server or mail clients. The DNS settings are the only changes that need to be made and those are made with the domain name servers for your domain.

What mail servers are supported?
All Internet mail servers are supported by our spam filtering system. If your mail server operates using the Internet SMTP protocol then VirusGator will work with your system.

How accurate is your spam filtering?
Our spam filtering is very accurate. The default settings of our system should yield a better than 98% accuracy rate at identifying spam.

Will I lose any mail?
Absolutely not; one of the features of the VirusGator mail filtering system is the ability to divert questionable messages—those which have a high spam score-into a pending queue to be held for later review by a human administrator. This assures that you will never lose any legitimate mail or lose a prospect inquiry due to spam filtering.

What do you do with all the spam?
The VirusGator anti spam system works by filtering your mail. This means the mail is not actually stored on our servers; it is funneled through our servers. A small portion of each message is stored in the database which is used to identify spam messages-but the actual message does not get stored on our servers. Mail that fails to make it through our system remains on the sending servers which will ultimately expire and delete those bad messages. This means that your disk, bandwidth, and CPU resources are not lost due to spammers.

What do you do with the viruses?
Our virus filtering system has a great deal of flexibility in handling viruses. You may choose to discard viruses automatically, or you may wish to hold viruses in quarantine, alternately you can reject viruses, or even quarantine and reject viruses.

What is whitelisting?
Whitelisting is the process of specifying in advance senders, domains, or networks, which are automatically considered friendly and are allowed to send mail to your domain.

What are blacklists, do you use them?
The VirusGator system has the optional ability to use black lists in handling your mail. A black list is a list of hosts or networks which are known to harbor spammers or known to be a source of spam activity.

How fast is the spam filtering?
Very fast-in most instances the filtering of spam takes less than 10ms to complete. Other than the absence of spam from your mail, your users should not notice any changes in the handling of e-mail.

What happens if my mail server goes down?
If your mail server were to fail, mail remains queued at the sending server until such time as your mail server becomes available again. In most cases as long as your mail server is restored within four days you should not experience any loss of mail.

How often do you update the service for detecting new viruses and spam?
The VirusGator system is updated hourly for virus definitions and spam definitions are updated continuously as new forms of spam are identified.

What can I do if I get a spam in my mailbox?
If you have enabled tagging in your stream and a spam message makes it into your mailbox you may click on the link and vote for the message as spam. This has the benefit of further training the VirusGator System in identifying future spam.

I still have spam showing up even though we set up filtering, what could be wrong?
Mail servers on the Internet-legitimate mail servers-rely on DNS queries to determine the mail exchanger for a given domain name. Spammers often will attempt to deliver mail to a mail server that is not listed as the mail exchanger. For example if your web site is hosted on a server that is also operating a mail server, the spammer may attempt to deliver mail directly to that server even though it is not listed as the mail server for the domain. A legitimate mail server would never attempt to deliver mail to any server not listed as the correct mail exchanger. It is possible to configure most mail servers to accept mail only from our mail server, prevent any underhanded tricks from spammers. The chance of rejecting any real mail by configuring your normal mail server to accept connections only from our servers is almost non-existent.

What is your privacy policy?
Please refer to our privacy policy page for details.

Is your company related in any way to gator.com?
Absolutely not; we have no relation in any way shape or form to gator.com, or the adware which gator.com distributes. VirusGator is a service, not software and has nothing to do with software on a WorkStation computer. If you are attempting to rid your computer of the gator.exe program, you may wish to visit Lavasoft USA and download their Adaware SE application.

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