Domain Level SPAM and Anti-Virus for Free

Has anyone ever used or heard of MX GuardDog http://www.mxguarddog.com? They offer free services for placing a link on your web pages.

I have never used their service, so I can't help in that regard.  Looks like an OK deal to me though, what is the catch?

It's NOT free. You have to put links on your web site to "earn" licenses. One link earns you 40 licenses.

There is NO company contact information on this site, and while the domain seems to be registered to someone in the US, the server is hosted in Canada. Maybe everything could be fine, but it makes me VERY nervious.

Even more so because the email service they provide is outsourced, which I take to mean that your email must pass through their servers to be filtered. Since we don't know anything about the company, we don't know anything about the ethics and security of the company either.

This service should NOT be used without more research and testing, in my opinion.

Hi Christian,

Thanks for the input, I see that you put links on your site to "earn" but that seems OK to me.  I have no problem with where their server is located either, as long as it is fast enough to access.

Have you tried it yourself?

I'm going to register with one of my extra domain names and test it, I will report back here.

I would be very skeptical of free mail filtering.  I checked out the website and it didn't give very much information.  The only way to contact them for support is via email.  That in my mind raises a few red flags.  What happens if you have your email filtering through their servers and things suddenly stop coming?  Are you going to hope that an email to support will get it fixed quickly? 

Right, good points.

And the issue I was rasing was not that the mail was on a server somewhere else, but how safe and secure the email was? What if that site offers free anti-spam services, but what they are really doing is looking for a way to see people's email and steal passwords and other information? I'm not saying they are, but I'm saying that without knowing who you are dealing with, how can you trust them?

Why should I think this way? Because you cannot trust ANYONE on the Internet. A couple of months ago I found a free service that lets you use any and all of your IM clients in one place and you can even use IM with a web browser. So you can IM from any computer anytime. The problem with this "free service" is that it was run by someone in Russia! It too, may be fine, but do we really want to let strangers get their hands on all our information? What if some hacker from another country breaks into THEIR system and gets our information???

Try any service you want, but try to find out as much about them as you can to start with, and BE CAREFUL!!!

Gary, excellent point.  But I actually ran into a poor issue with a paid for support for email filtering.  I was at a technology show on Tuesday where I was a vendor and had received contact details from a potential client.  I attempted to email him and it bounced with no helpful information at all on why it was bounced.  After doing my own diagnostics to try and figure out why, I went to his email filtering provider (mxlogic.net) and attempted to find some resources on why my email was blocked.  My Google searches indicated that the most likely reason was because of a mismatched rDNS entry - which is easy enough to fix (and I have) but hardly everyone can provide.

I left a message for them via their website.  It was easy to do so, and I did it thinking they would never respond.  They actually did respond, but their response wasn't very helpful either.

mxlogic.net:

In order to completely troubleshoot this issue, we need our customer to contact their MX Logic support provider and have the following information available:

• Email address of sender
• Email address of recipient
• Date of message (in last 10 days)
• Subject Full bounce message if applicable

This information will allow us to run the necessary logs and give a more detailed description of why the message was delayed or not delivered

To which I tried to reply and ask them how it was possible that their client provide this information to anyone if they never received the bounced message to begin with.  However, my reply to their email was bounced back to me with no indication on why.  Services like this annoy me, primarily because any anti-spam system that regularly blocks legitimate mail is a failure in my eyes.  The support staff is sitting behind their blind wall thinking they are doing good, but in reality its very poor and they don't even know it.

Not all email filtering services are bad.  Perhaps collectively the email admins on this site could put together a list of features that a good filtering service should have to assist people in making an informed choice.

To follow up with http://www.mxguarddog.com...

I have a domain I have signed up with them.  I have to say I'm impressed so far.  I can set up how often each a user recieves a personal email listing the emails which were blocked.

You do earn user accounts based on providing a basic link at the bottom of a web page.  By providing a link on your highest rated pages such as your home page you get 20 seats.  

To answer some excellent questions that have been posed...

They do list a physical address in Millersville, MD.  I am also working to understand more about the company and their privacy policy.

 

plalonde:

You do earn user accounts based on providing a basic link at the bottom of a web page.  By providing a link on your highest rated pages such as your home page you get 20 seats.  

No apparent need for them to generate income, much less a profit.  Just burn through venture capital while trading services for links. An outstanding example of  Web2.0nomics.

-ENO

 

I mentioned I was going to sign up and report back, I will share some of my findings here as well.

Signup was easy, I had some issue adding my email accounts to the system.  I sent an email to their support desk and got a reply quickly and was able to resolve my problem.

The domain I signed up with was just a spare domain name I was not using, so I'm not really able to test it that much as the domain does not get any email.

 

Christian_SEO mentioned you get 40 licenses for a link, you list 20.  I was offered far less for a link from my domain (which does not even have a webpage up actually).  Not sure how clear it is, but I found this page that may explain it some:

http://mxguarddog.com/faq.how_many_email/

Basically no clear number of licenses are given for a link, everyone is different.  They do have a testing page where I plugged in a number of sites (google.com, yahoo.com etc.) to see what different webpages would earn.  Different numbers were given, so there is some calculator they have or something.

So far I like what I've seen (which is not much), but I will probably put a more important domain online to test it more.

Our office is not interested in using the service, we have a policy of not endorcing any product and placing a link to their service would be considered an endorcement so no go at the office.

 

Anyone who wants to test the anti spam on their spare domains can just create a coupel accounts on the domains and start posting comments on blogs and forums that don't hide your email address.  You should be able to start seeing floods soon.  Or sign up for dubious mailing lists.  Maybe even search on Google for mailing lists that explicitly share/sell your email addresses to other firms.

I do understand the skepticism, but as a company in same field, we think it is possible to provide Free Email filtering services (just like Hotmail or Gmail provides Free Email boxes).

Do look at SAFENTRIX,

As far as reliability goes, I don't see why being "Free" should affect anything (unless there is no revenue
model).

And as far as Support goes, the only saving grace of even commercial firms is that the servers do not go down (due to redundancy, etc). If emails stop coming with any provider, you will find the support situation pretty bad.

If emails stop coming in, that means there is a massive failure and no company can afford to build an infrastructure for personally replying to ALL clients.

From the Safentrix Terms of Service:

"SAFENTRIX Standard Edition adds text and/or Web links to every email received by the user, including text and links pointing to third parties. By using SAFENTRIX Standard Edition, you agree to such modification of emails."

So let's see if I understand your free service.  You filter out the random SPAM that constitutes SOME messages and replace it with your own SPAM added to ALL messages.

Are you serious?????   Why would anyone want you to do that?

-ENO

Brilliant!  I also love the statement about how no company can build an infrastructure that could reply to all its clients.

I hope the comment is not made sarcastically.

But whatever it is , I stand by the comment and I hope it is not intentional that you have deleted a key word in my statement.

I had said "an infrastructure for personally replying to ALL clients.". You had deleted the "personally" part which is the key.

Replying to all people is easy. Just send a mass email. But if you think that is personal, we just have to agree to disagree.

You must have heard Gmail having outage for an hour or so in the last month. I am also sure you know that Gmail offers paid as well as Free Email Services. When the outage was there, Gmail just posted a notice on the web site. I don't think they (or any other company for that matter would) called each commercial customer and informed of the same.

This is exactly what I meant.

And also this reply was specifically to a point made which said

"What happens if you have your email filtering through their servers and things suddenly stop coming?  Are you going to hope that an email to support will get it fixed quickly? "

My point is that no companty builds infrasrtucture for personally handling all clients and therefore in this situation it does not matter whether it is commercial or Free service provider.