Setting up the SpamExperts Email Filtering Service

The SmarterMail system that is set up for your email by default has an array of spam fighting tools available, but admittedly, the settings can be a bit complicated to work with.

Many of you asked us to make a more user-friendly anti-spam option available, but to keep the cost low. So we partnered with SpamExperts to provide high level spam filtering services that are easy to manage and really affordable.

The SpamExperts service receives email addressed to your domain, filters it, then sends it along to the mail servers here at Winhost. The service is distributed across multiple servers all over the world, so it’s fast and reliable.

We’re going to cover the steps necessary to activate SpamExperts for your domain, which, for our purposes here, we’ll assume is hosted at Winhost (though you can set up SpamExperts service for domains hosted elsewhere too).

The first thing we’re going to do is go to the SpamExperts section of Control Panel and click the “Order New Spam Experts” button.

Next choose a domain from the dropdown menu (you can also enter a domain hosted elsewhere), choose a billing period and hit the “Continue” button.

The next page shows the current email server(s) for the domain you selected. Make note of any entries in the box. If you ever cancel the Spam Experts service in the future, you will have to update your DNS MX records to point back to these server(s).

Click the “continue” button.

If everything looks good on the billing page, hit the “Submit My Order” button.

Reload the SpamExperts page and click the “Manage” link.

In order for Spam Experts to begin filtering your email, the DNS MX records for your domain have to be updated. If your domain is hosted here, all you have to do to update your MX records is click the “Yes, update my DNS records” link.

If you are setting up SpamExperts for a domain that isn’t hosted at Winhost, this page gives you the MX settings for the domain. You’ll have to go to where the domain is managed to update the MX records.

That’s all there is to it. Your email is now set up to route through the SpamExperts system. Remember, the DNS change may take a few hours to propagate, so you may continue to see spam in your inbox until that happens.

We’ve found that the default SpamExperts settings will stop the vast majority of spam. But if you want to do further tweaking you can access the SpamExperts portal, which contains a number of very powerful tools. Use of the SpamExperts portal is beyond the scope of this article, but you can see the domain-level documentation here and the user-level documentation here.