Thursday, May 5, 2011

MX Guarddog Review

 

Every once in a while, you come across a nice little diamond in the rough.

Check out http://www.mxguarddog.com

You put a small text based link somewhere on your site and you get free spam and virus filtering service!

Registration and setup were easy. I did this for myself and then I did it for a client.

You change your MX records to point to the ones owned by mxguarddog and then configure mxguarddog to forward your “clean” mail to your regular mail server.

For myself this was easy as I run my own virtual exchange server.

For my client, I ran into a problem as the client was being hosted on a 3rd party and they didn’t give me access to everything in the cPanel so things didn’t work right away. I had to get the MX records changed – but then things broke.

I contacted mxguarddog support – they got back to me in a matter of minutes – diagnosed the problem and told me how to fix it.  I contacted the 3rd party hosting company, got them to select the option: “Always accept mail locally even if the primary mx does not point to this server.” – or Local Exchanger (depends on your version of cPanel).

Voila! Pain free Spam and Virus filtering!

You can add multiple domains to a single account – you can whitelist, blacklist.

My only suggestion would be that they let you see statistics about the numbers of mail messages delivered, spam, virus etc.

Overall – I give this a 9.5 out of 10….fantastic!

One technical note: In order to really benefit from a service like this, you need to restrict your mail server to only allow mail from the mxguarddog.com servers – look at their instructions for the IP’s you need to allow.  Otherwise, spammers may still try to send mail directly to your server bypassing the MX Guarddog guys – and there isn’t much they can do about mail they don’t get.

free spam filter  cloud based spam filter