Almost every ISP is fighting a battle against rising volumes of junk email (and some would argue that this battle has been going on for years) and at Gradwell things are no different.

Specifically, we’re concerned that a huge chunk of our server resource is currently being used to accept junk email and just store it, with no intention from users for ever reading it. We estimate nearly 3 emails a second, equating to between 100 and 200 gigabytes of storage, is currently being deployed in this manner.

In addition, customers who store emails for long periods in IMAP mailboxes, with no sorting or archiving of email, end up with mailboxes containing upto 50,000 files and it is proving virtually impossible to design and implement an email system that allows speedy and reliable access to a mailbox of that size, for the low, flat fees which we charge.

Therefore, in addition to the ongoing server work previously discussed (a complete physical rework of the mail system is currently underway), we are announcing two key policy changes to the way we handle email for customers.

• Firstly, we will move to spam filtering mail using block lists (specifically the SpamHaus ZEN List), by default for all customers (previously we only implemented filtering for customers when they opted-in).
• Secondly, if a customer has more than 1000 messages in their inbox, we will automatically archive those emails which are more than 90 days old, into a set of sub-folders, creating one folder per month.

We will begin implementing this change, on Monday 21st January 2008 and we will roll it out to customers gradually.

If you wish to opt out your domains (or turn the filtering on now!) from the SpamHaus spam filtering, you may do so on this control panel page: https://hosting.gradwell.net/login/mailzenoptin.

You can also use that url to turn spamhaus mail filtering on immediately instead of waiting for it to be turned on globally.

We hope that these two measures will provide a good improvement to the speed and quaility of the email you receive.

If you have any questions, please contact our support team.