Coastal Wave Spam & Virus Filtering

Coastal Wave utilizes two separate e-mail servers. One of them handles Coastal Wave addresses (@coastalwave.net, @cwoh.net, etc). The second server handles all of our web hosting clients. For example, if you have your own domain name hosted on our system (www.yourname.com), those e-mail accounts would be on our Web Hosting server. Below is detailed information on the spam and virus filtering on both systems.

Spam filtering on Coastal Wave addresses

Our Coastal Wave mail server checks every inbound message for both spam and viruses. The filter takes the following actions when a message is identified:

• Spam messages: To prevent the loss of legitimate e-mail, spam messages are not deleted. Instead, the subject line is prefixed with a [spam?] tag. This allows you to quickly sort through your messages, and allows you to use your e-mail program's filtering features to handle spam messages in any way you want. For example, in Outlook or Outlook Express, you can go to Tools -> Message Rules to create message filtering rules. You can use this feature to either take messages with [spam?] in the subject line and delete them, or move them to a separate folder. For assistance with this, feel free to call us!
• Virus messages: When our virus scanner detects a virus in the message, it is immediately deleted. The sender of the message receives an e-mail from our automated system informing them that the message contained a virus and was deleted.

Filtering on Web Hosting accounts

Web hosting customers have a bit more flexibility for their filtering. By default, spam and virus filtering are turned off. Customers can either call our support line, or use the automated web hosting control panel (available from our support site) to enable filtering options themselves.

When enabled, the customer can use the control panel to configure how spam and virus messages are handled.

For spam messages, the system can be configured to tag the message with the subject SPAM MESSAGE (similar to Coastal Wave filtering above), or can forward the message to a different address (for example, spam@yourname.com).

For virus messages, the message is usually "scrubbed" of the virus and then delivered. You can configure a different behavior, as well as configure warning messages to be sent to the sender, the recipient, or any other address of your choosing.

Configuration of these options requires access to our web hosting control panel, which is available free of charge to all of our hosting customers. If you do not have access, or cannot remember your username or password, please call or e-mail our support staff for assistance.