With domain filtering your email gets filtered before it reaches your email server. You accomplish this by changing your current "Mail Exchanger" (MX) in your DNS to Spamdrain's servers instead of your current ones. In order for this to work you first have to add your domain to your Spamdrain account along with your current email server and then specify which addresses we should filter.
Please see here for more info about MX records.
Important! First, please verify that you really need domain filtering. We only recommend domain filtering if:
- You are the owner of the domain and are allowed to make changes in the DNS for the domain. You cannot use domain filtering if you have a @gmail.com, @hotmail.com, @att.net address or similar. You need to be the owner of the name after the @ character in your email address.
- You want to filter more than five email addresses. If you want to filter fewer addresses than five it's usually a lot easier to use POP3/IMAP filtering.
- You are familiar with updating your DNS. If you do not know what DNS is you do not want get into domain filtering since it will most likely cause you trouble.
- Your email provider allows you to have other MX records than their own servers. Some providers refuse to accept email messages if you change your MX records to Spamdrain's servers. Please check that you can update your MX records without causing your provider to reject email.
Now that you qualify for domain filtering, please follow the steps below. Please do not try domain filtering if you aren't familiar with changing MX records for your domain.
How to setup Spamdrain domain filtering
- Make sure you qualify for using domain filtering by reading the section above.
- Create a Spamdrain+ account if you do not already have one or upgrade your current basic subscription to the Spamdrain+ at the order page.
- Go to Domains and add your domain - enter your domain name and your current email server that Spamdrain should forward email to.
- Go to Users and add the email addresses you wish to filter. For each email address you may also add aliases by clicking the address after you have added it.
- Change your MX records to point to Spamdrain's servers ONLY. Please see this link for more information.
Important! You must put Spamdrain's servers ONLY as MX records. You cannot keep any of your current MX records since Spamdrain won't accept any email for your domain if you do. - You may also consider changing your firewall (if possible) so that only Spamdrain's servers are allowed to connect to your email server. You should do this after a couple of days once the DNS changes have fully propagated:
How to update your firewall rules - The changes made to your DNS will take up to 48 hours before they fully propagate to all servers around the internet. Spammers often update their DNS cache even less frequent. So it will probably take a couple of days before all email goes through Spamdrain instead of being directly delivered to your real email server. If you still receive spam and don't find it under "Allowed", please see this page for possible solutions.