Host4Yourself.com is a US-based web hosting company founded in 2001. The company boasts six carrier-grade, US-based data centers and offers managed IT services, web hosting, dedicated servers, and server co-location for various sized businesses.
1. Compromised accounts were leading to IP blocklisting
Frequently, Host4Yourself.com found its shared hosting nodes had problems with IP blocklisting. In this scenario, one IP can have up to 500 domains that face bouncebacks and rejections due to a stolen email account or compromised site; legitimate clients were being penalized and suffering loss of revenues, which reflected poorly on the host.
2. Frustrated clients
Blocklisting also meant a spike in support tickets for Host4Yourself.com from frustrated clients, who were unable to send email. Although the Host4Yourself.com team would work swiftly to address the problem, for a time clients were unable to send or receive email from their server.
3. Valuable time being taken away from employees
Host4Yourself.com’s CEO, Evan Kamlet, recognized that this vicious cycle of blocklisting-removal-repeat was not a sustainable path for the company. It was taking valuable time away from employees who, instead of working on company growth, found themselves frequently focusing on blocklisting issues.
Evan saw that a form of outbound spam filtering had to be established—and soon. The company tested a number of outbound spam filtering systems but found they simply did not have what it takes to solve Host4Yourself.com’s blocklisting issues.
“Anytime there was an issue, the different solutions we tried would suspend an entire IP from sending outgoing email. This would actually disrupt us more than getting blocklisted in the first place,” he said.
“The major difference with MailChannels Outbound—and the thing that makes it a viable solution for us—is that it will only block the pattern of abusive email it detects.”
Before deciding to test the MailChannels outbound spam filter system, Evan spoke about his reservations. “The ability of the algorithms to be accurate was a huge concern for us because we had never seen one that works all that well,” he said.
Yet MailChannels Outbound’s sophisticated algorithms and machine-learning technology proved successful for Host4Yourself.com. “We were pleasantly surprised when we saw that with MailChannels Outbound, we did not get false positives all the time,” Evan said.
Earlier this year, MailChannels introduced the Not Spam button to their Outbound Filtering service, which Evan says has further improved the service. The Not Spam button aims to reduce false positives and allows clients to report the false positives themselves. “Introducing the Not Spam button was huge–it saves us a ton of time because we had to figure this out manually before, whereas now our clients have the ability to do it themselves. They don’t need to report it to us so we’re spending a lot less time figuring out what is legitimate email and what is spam.”
MailChannels Outbound Filtering solved three critical issues for Host4Yourself.com:
1. Blocklisting is no longer an issue at the web hosting company, with MailChannels Cloud detecting any compromised accounts and reporting them to the Host4Yourself.com team so they can be dealt with.
2. MailChannels Outbound frees up time for the Host4Yourself.com team to spend on more important tasks. Employees no longer have to spend hours responding to support tickets and trying to solve blocklisting issues. Says Evan, “Staff are able to focus on things we consider much more important and don’t have to waste their time on the tedious task that MailChannels Outbound Filtering does for us now.”
3. Customer service has improved with MailChannels Outbound in place, which has boosted the host’s reputation and made potential clients more likely to sign up for hosting services as a result. “We’re attracting more clients who know what MailChannels is and the benefits they will get with our service thanks to our partnership with MailChannels,” Evan said.