Anti-Spam FAQ

The sending of unsolicited emails which provoke complaints from the recipients. Posting commercial ads to USENET newsgroups that do not permit it. Posting articles containing binary encoded data to non-binary newsgroups. Excessive and repeated posting of off-topic messages to newsgroups. Excessive and repeated Cross-Posting. Email harassment of other Internet users.

You can stop spam by using an ISP such as ourselves who filters out spam and viruses. Free email accounts offered from ISP's or other sources, tend to be the worst effected for spam. We recommend the best solution to say no to spam is to get your own private personalised domain name from us and have your own email accounts which will be automatically be filtered for spam and viruses. Another advantage is if you ever change internet service providers (ISPs) in the future you won't need to change your email address each time.

If you think your email account account has been compromised or sending spam or you start receiving spam bounce back messages, the reason could be because spammers are using your PC email account to send spam. They may have guessed your email account password or you have a virus on your PC.

We recommend the first thing you should do is change your email password, then scan your PC for viruses, Trojans.

You can stop spammers, bulk email marketing campaign senders making use of process tracking to monitor email campaigns which can cause end users not even being aware they even sent an email response back!

These type of spam requests for read receipts in some cases are just configured, so the spammer can check for valid email addresses, but most of the time it may not be intentional or the spammer just wants to cause more confusion to hide their activities, since the sender’s address could be invalid or worse a valid email address of an innocent third party not the original sender of the spam and the read/not read receipt bounces back to the victim in the form of an NDR (non-delivery report) or is sent successfully to another innocent third party!

Note: For system administrators of mail servers we recommend bounce back email messages should only ever be sent back to local senders only!

In Outlook, Tracking settings can be found in Tools, Options, Email Options, Tracking Options.

If you don't ever want to send receipts back, set Outlook to "Never send a response", otherwise we recommend to set Outlook email client to "Ask me before sending a response".

It is also, important all other tracking options are cleared "Process requests and responses on arrival" and "Process receipts on arrival". Otherwise your Outlook client could still send silent responses without your knowledge upon accidently opening said spam email!

This type of scenario can also be detected by searching the message header for "Disposition-Notification-To:".

Disposition-Notification-To-header defined in [RFC 2298] could cause huge numbers of acknowledgements to be emailed to an unsuspecting third party.

Always ensure you have the latest security patches installed and you should never open email attachments unless you know the person they are being sent from and you are expecting them.

Please forward all spam reports to abuse@alpha1teclabs.com.
Please note: all submitted abuse reports must be in English.

WE DO NOT ALLOW "SPAM" OR SEND UNSOLICITED EMAIL!

We do not send the actual email. It could be that a Webmaster that sent you the email is not following the rules. A Webmaster that does not follow the rules will be removed from the program and will not be paid. They will forfeit the money they have earned and their account will be terminated.

We do not Spam. We do not allow Spam. We will terminate Webmasters that are "Spamming". All promotional newsletter emails sent through our servers have been requested by the targeted email address. It is very easy to spoof the From address in an email. In fact, most email software will allow you to change the From or the Reply-to address to whatever you want. Spammers use spam bots and other software tools that picks a From address at random from their database of addresses, and sometimes even the recipient address is forged. In such a case, you can just explain that it was the work of a Spammer who forged one of our email addresses or customers. Ask them to check the Received lines in the email headers you will see that the source of the message was not one of our mail servers or IP addresses. Black lists based on email address/domain don't work, spammers never use their own networks, domains or addresses anymore.

Any future delivery of email which has previously been through the spam quarantine reporting filters and confirmed as spam will be placed in a folder called spam within your web mail; after 30 days spam will be automatically deleted. You should check at least once a week, for any genuine mail; false positives. All you need to do if you find any incorrectly labelled email as spam in the spam folder, is then move the email to your in box.

Challenge/Response is a system that requires the sender of an email that he/she actually sent the email, in most cases the majority will be spam. Re-confirmation must be provided manually for Challenge/Response to work. If the e-mail was sent by a mass-mailing system, there is usually no human at the email address that is used in the "From" header, thus re-confirmation cannot be provided. Pending senders are authorized or denied by the Challenge Response system automatically, however, it will also be necessary to manually maintain this from time-to-time. The most convenient way to manually maintain the Challenge/Response pending e-mails is via the Web Mail which contains the special section under "Settings" called "Challenge Response".

We recommend you select all emails which are not spam, then select:

  • Authorize pending (accepts mail and places in your inbox folder)
Then select all the emails which are spam, then select:
  • Mark as spam (deletes mail and records email content as spam)

In the most typical situation, messages arriving at the Challenge/Response system after they have already passed all "white listing" possibilities as described in the Black & White Listing Techniques and are already marked as spam.

  • When the mail is received by the server it is not delivered to the recipient, but stored in the temporary folder. If more messages are sent from the same sender then all are stored in the same folder. Such messages are marked as "pending message". If pending message is not authorized after 21 days - it is automatically deleted.
  • Server generates the request for confirmation, which is delivered to the sender of the e-mail. It uses the sender from the SMTP protocol, which can be different from the "Mail From:" displayed in the message.
  • Sender (if exists) receives the request for confirmation and confirms it. The confirmation requires visiting the special web site and entering some characters in the text field. It prevents usage of the automated confirmation systems.
  • Server will receive the confirmation from sender and will deliver the e-mail's to the recipient. The sender is also entered to the "approved senders list" so confirmation not requested the next time.

Suspect Spam email will be held in quarantine for 30 days and if no action taken by yourself will then be deleted and classified as future spam. Each day you will receive regular quarantine reports only if you have received additional new spam. Currently quarantine spam reports are sent out at 09:00, 13:00, 17:00 and 21:00 each day.

All of your entire detected spam email held in quarantine can also be accessed at any time via the Web Mail login under the special section under "Settings" called "Challenge Response".

From your quarantine email report or your webmail login you are able to:

  • Whitelist / Authorise: Delivers email and trusts future emails from sender.
  • Deliver: Delivers email only.
  • Delete: Deletes email only.
  • Blacklist: Deletes email and blocks future emails from sender.
  • Show message: Allows you to read spam email in plain text.

Example quarantine report in Outlook:
Outlook Quarantine Report

Example quarantine report in Webmail:
Webmail Quarantine Report

Most Spammer's mail servers will try to deliver a message to the receiving mail server and give up if they don't get a quick response. A "real" mail server will retry the session after a period of time. Greylisting allows you to reject an incoming session for a specified period of time. This will deter many spam mail servers from sending their messages.

Yes, we provide full mass mailing newsletter list support for all mail hosts, all sites must fully comply with current UK spam laws. Message join, subscribe and leaving automatically processed with moderation confirmation and digest. Message sent to list replicated to all list members (with moderation, content checks, MML Processing). Bounce and returns automatically managed. File management options for list FAQ, policy documents, etc. Any emails sent must have been requested by the targeted email address and must clearly show the unsubscribe link. You may not refuse or ignore unsubscribe removal requests from your list. List owners should respond to member requests for manual removal from the list with courtesy and timeliness. You may not use the Services to send unsolicited email ("spam"), commercial or non-commercial. Unsolicited email is defined as email sent to individuals without their permission. Your email will be considered unsolicited if your mailing list addresses are not 100% opt-in by your email list members. If your email addresses came from harvesting, a purchased email list, another mailing list (even with the approval of the list owner), or were compiled by any other method other than direct subscription from your email list, for the purposes of this Agreement, those emails will be considered unsolicited email ("spam"). Misuse of a mailing list may result in the suspension or termination of the mailing list, of computing privileges, and/or of network access privileges.