Intel has announced that it is pulling the plug on it’s McAfee MX Logic (aka Intel Security spam protection) service. All MX Logic customers will need to find a new provider by January, 2017. As we understand it, they have been having issues with outages and poor performance for quite some time now.

If you are a customer of MX Logic, we encourage you to try out SpamHero’s 30 day trial.  Once you give us a try, you’ll wish you had said goodbye to MX Logic years ago.

If you are a reseller or partner with MX Logic, please check out our private label reseller program. It’s free and you can be signed up in the next 60 seconds.

Writing this blog post feels a little like déjà vu.  Probably because MX Logic’s story is so similar to Postini’s… Google buys Postini.  Google kills Postini.  Only difference here is that first McAfee purchased MX Logic, and then less than a year later, Intel purchased McAfee.

A little fish gets swallowed by a bigger fish only to be swallowed by a yet even bigger fish.  The little fish (MX Logic) is killed.

We wish a warm welcome to all our new customers coming from MX Logic!

It’s hard to believe it’s been a year since we’ve posted anything to our blog!  We’ve actually accomplished a lot this past year.  Aside from all that we’ve done to keep up with our growth, we’ve been quietly pushing out new features and making our service better.  We know there are still plenty of great ideas from our Community Suggestion Box that still need to be developed, and we’re excited to add as many of these features as possible.

Ironically, one request that has been popular among users coming over from Postini is that we be less accurate with our filtering.  Yes, you heard that right, less accurate.  Ok, I’m sort of kidding, but not entirely.

Some users noticed that after they switched from Postini that they were suddenly getting a lot more email.  Some of it they were happy to see because it was messages that Postini was not supposed to be blocking in the first place.  Other messages they were less happy to see because they were emails that they probably subscribed to receive, but they didn’t really want.   So, really, nobody has requested that we be less accurate, but rather that we provide an option to block all bulk email without blocking good email.

Enter SpamHero’s new bulk email filter!  For the past week you may have noticed in your quarantine or clean message viewer that some messages now show a new icon next to them.  Since the bulk email filter is off by default, this icon by itself does not change the decision of whether our filter quarantines messages.  You may see this icon on both clean email and spam.  The purpose of this icon is to show you which messages would be sent to the quarantine if you choose to enable the bulk email filter.   In that way, you can decide if the new bulk email filter is right for you, before it is enabled.

New bulk email icon shows emails that are recognized by our filter as being sent in bulk.

This feature has been released with a “beta” label as there are still a few pieces that we haven’t put in place yet that will make this new feature even more useful.  For example, you can only enable this feature for an entire domain.  It is not possible to enable the feature account wide or on a single email address yet.  It is also not possible to quickly display only the messages in the quarantine that are blocked by the bulk filter.  We considered waiting until some of these filters are available before we released the feature, but decided we’d prefer to get some feedback from our users on it while we work on completing some of these other parts of it.

The bulk email filter can be enabled by logging into your SpamHero account from the Settings -> filtering policies page.  Once the filter has been enabled, if there are senders that send you bulk emails that you still want to receive, you will need to add their email address (or domain) to your Approved Sender’s list.

Enjoy! 🙂

So, a customer asked today why we haven’t blogged about Google’s announcement that they are shutting down Postini.  Well, I guess we’ve been too busy welcoming all the new customers and resellers that have resulted from that announcement to worry about it.  And, to be honest, we’re not sure how we feel about it.   We’ll miss the steady stream of customers that were flowing over from Postini for one reason or another.  Some of those coming from Postini told us it was lack of support, others say it was false positives, others say poor user interface, and still others were just unhappy with the amount of spam slipping through.  Of course, Google plans on just “upgrading” everyone to their Google Apps service and promises more instructions will follow.   That being the case, perhaps the steady stream of new customers coming from Google’s services will continue, as we’ve also seen an uptick in Google Apps customers signing up for SpamHero.  That’s right… even though spam filtering is supposed to be included with Google Apps, we are still getting Google Apps customers that sign up for SpamHero and having us filter their email before it gets to their Google Apps account.  To me, that really says something.  Perhaps it’s the increase in spam some people are reporting after switching to Google Apps?

Ok, I’m probably getting a little carried away here.  All I really wanted to do here is give a warm welcome to the Postini customers and resellers who have joined us recently.  We appreciate your support.  Be sure to check out our new Community Suggestion Box feature in your back office and help us shape the future of SpamHero!  We’re listening.