“We began a series of modifications to our email service two and a half years ago in order to make it more dependable. Our email service had not gotten the care it deserved over the years, and it was beginning to show. Customers, friends, relatives, and even Rippa Hosting staff members experienced email delays or rejections on a regular basis due to blocklists, email client connection timeouts and failures, and numerous webmail difficulties. We set out to change it once we discovered the influence we might have, and the results have been remarkable.
We’ve made great strides, but there’s still a long way to go!
Our current objective is to transition our spam filtering service for incoming communications to a new supplier. Unfortunately, we’ve discovered that it may be extremely aggressive, sending mails to your spam folder that obviously do not belong there. Spam blocking is an art that demands careful attention to get the balance exactly right, and we’re working on that balance to get acceptable outcomes. Our new provider is collaborating with us to resolve the issue and focus development efforts to enhance inbound mail filtering at Rippa Hosting.
One approach we’re using to address the issue is to train the spam filtering algorithm in bulk. Some customers have contacted to our tech support staff for assistance, and they have been requested to send samples of mis-filtered communications. Thank you to everyone who has contributed; these messages have been tremendously useful in fast training the filtering algorithm.
We’ll be safelisting recognised good senders at the Rippa Hosting level as we monitor complaints of wrongly rejected communications. While it may take some time to train the filtering algorithm, these modifications will have an immediate impact. When well-known domains have a valid DMARC setup, we add them to our global safelist. This is a manual operation, comparable to the allow and blocklist settings in the control panel and mailboxes interface. We’re also striving to enhance the UI of our client control panel to make things even simpler in the future.
Over the previous two weeks, we’ve noticed improvements in the functioning of our spam filters. We’ve observed fewer valid emails captured by the spam filter, and customer complaints are decreasing. Our spam filtering partner is planning more modifications to increase its capabilities, and we are continuing our human safelisting process. We aim to satisfy your (and our own) expectations very soon.
So Far, Enhancements
One of the first changes we made was to fully replace the hardware we use for email service. Our previous generation of email hardware had reached the end of its useful life, and it was struggling to keep up with the increase in email users and the quantity of storage they needed. The new hardware is speedier, simpler to maintain, and extremely scalable. This has resulted in faster and more stable email service, as well as fewer mistakes in users’ email clients.
Next, we tackled the issue of rejected customer emails as a result of our email servers being on blocklists. Spammers, however, are tenacious and will use whatever way available to them — legal or illegal — to transmit their spam messages. This includes getting into our customers’ email accounts and utilising them to disseminate spam. Because of the activity on these hijacked accounts, our mail servers are added to blocklists, and genuine emails are often banned as a consequence.
We used a third-party service to filter outgoing emails and prevent the transmission of fraudulent or spam communications. We instantly watched our email servers’ reputation improve, and their inclusion on email blocklists is now a thing of the past.
We upgraded our webmail system earlier this year to Roundcube, a popular open-source platform. While this may seem to be a simple technical upgrade, there was a lot of effort involved in migrating existing data from the previous webmail system to Roundcube. We also took use of the opportunity to update the infrastructure and deployment procedure behind the scenes, making it simpler to run in the future. After everything was said and done, we had a more performant webmail system with a beautiful and responsive design.
Future Plans
We have a few more tasks we aim to finish in order to further stabilise and enhance the dependability of our email service. The next project will be a modification that will be unnoticeable to email users. We will be upgrading the architecture of our email back end to make it more manageable and fault-tolerant. This isn’t an interesting project in terms of “amazing new features,” but it will result in reduced downtime and issues for the service.
In the future, we want to increase the deliverability of messages received from our hosting machines as well as client email sent outside of our service. These services are likewise impacted by hacked accounts, blocklists, and spammers. Our goal is to guarantee that such valid communications reach their intended recipients.
Once we’ve completed these critical early initiatives, we’ll have plenty of ideas to enhance the email experience even more. To mention a few, we wish to enhance the email user experience within our control, give better alternatives for spam management than just transferring it to the spam folder, and increase feature integration in webmail.
The list is large, but we are enthusiastic to develop it!
We appreciate your patience as we try to constantly enhance our email service at Rippa Hosting. Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any questions or comments concerning email; we much appreciate your input.”
