Ordering

To be sure you can use this service, check the "Can I use it" page which describes the requirements in detail. In short, if your business has its own domain name(s), you can use this service. We offer a low price for "family" domains that are not used for business purposes.

Determine how many domains your business uses for email addresses. It is typically only one, e.g. example.com, but there may be additional ones, e.g. example.net. You only need to sign up domains that have mailboxes (email addresses).

Determine how many mailboxes (email addresses) these domains have. Since this service works for entire domains, you must sign up all mailboxes. It is not possible to sign up only "some" mailboxes for a domain. Typically, the number of mailboxes you sign up for will be the same as the number of people in your organization.

Click "Sign Up" and enter your order. For smaller organizations of up to 100 people, we expect payment by credit card. The card will automatically be charged monthly following any free trial period. You can also take advantage or our early payment discount and prepay for twelve months at the price of ten. We will send invoices due upon receipt if you wish to prepay yearly.

The signup form will ask for a main (administrative) contact name and address, and optional billing and technical contacts.

When the signup is complete, you will receive an email confirmation including a "Login ID" and initial "Password". We also recommend printing the confirmation page.

The setup steps must be completed before you will notice any spam filtering.

Setup

Our system will determine your domain's e-mail server from your domain's highest priority DNS MX record. If this mail exchanger is not where we should send e-mail after filtering, please log into your control panel and update the Customer Mailserver setting for each domain.

Our system will then email you detailed instructions on how to change the MX records for your domain(s). This email will be sent through our "relays". This ensures that you only receive this email if your domain has been successfully added to our service. Since our system updates itself every five minutes, please allow 5 - 10 minutes to receive this email.

Changing Your MX Records

The last step necessary to enable our anti-spam service is to change the MX records for your domain(s). Don't know what MX records are? No problem - simply forward our e-mail message to the company or person in charge of your domain's web site and e-mail.

If your domain runs at a hosting company, you can usually forward our email message to their support department and they will change the MX records for you. Some of the larger hosting companies, let you change your own MX records through a control panel if you are comfortable doing so. Please note that your hosting company may take a day or so to fulfill your request for the MX record change. Depending on your current DNS configuration, specifically the TTL value, it could take several hours (maximum 72) for the change to propagate through the Internet once it is complete. Only then will our service be fully functional.

If your company runs its own mail server, you can forward our email message to the technical person or system administrator in charge of the server.

Once the MX record changes take effect and propagate through the Internet, you will notice a huge (95% +) reduction in spam.

Here are the necessary step-by-step instructions on how to change the MX records for common DNS providers:

1and1:

1. Select Domains
2. Check the domain you wish to edit the MX records for.
   
3. Select "Edit DNS Settings" from the DNS pull-down menu at the top.
4. Under Advanced DNS settings, select "Other mail server" next to Mail Server (MX record).
5. Enter the MX entries provided by SpamStopsHere and select "OK".

cPanel:

1. Select MX Entry, under Mail.
2. Enter MX records provided by SpamStopsHere.
3. Make sure that "Always accept mail locally even if the primary mx does not point to this server. " is selected.

GoDaddy:

1. Select the domain you wish to change the MX records for.
2. Select Total DNS contol and MX records.
3. Click add new MX record.
4. Select priority of MX record.  Hostname should be the "@" symbol.  The entries provided by SpamStopsHere are supplied in the "Enter goes to address" filed.  You can use the default TTL entry.

Network Solutions:

1. Click the Domains tab from the left menu.
2. Click Manage Domain Names.
3. Select the check boxes next to the domains that you want to edit.
4. Click Edit DNS.
5. On the Edit Domain Name Servers page, in the DNS Manager – Advanced Tools section, click Manage DNS Records.
6. On the DNS Manager Settings page, in the Host Aliases: MX Records section, click Add/Edit.
7. Your current MX records are listed in editable form, and any Network Solutions service that is associated with the MX record is listed under the Mail Server text box.
8. To add/edit MX records:
   
   • Enter the MX records provided by SpamStopsHere in the Mail Server text box and their associated priority numbers in the Priority text box
   • Click Continue
9. To delete MX records:
   
   • To the right of the MX record, select the check box in the Delete column
   • Click Continue
10. Review the list of requested changes.
11. Click Continue.

(Please Note: these instructions are accurate at the time of this writing.  Any support related questions regarding your DNS information should be directed to your DNS provider)

Configuration (Optional)

• Create policy filters and set them to forward to an e-mail address at your domain for review.

• Enable optional prewritten policy filters.

• Optionally specify mailboxes which bypass the spam filtering.

• Create and update your domain's "Whitelist" and "Blacklist".

• Configure additional features such as additional mailservers for the Enterprise Edition.

Recommended changes after 1 week of using our service

We recommend removing your domain's e-mail server from your domain's DNS MX records after you've used our service for approximately a week. This will help prevent e-mail from bypassing our service, and increase your spam blocked usually to 98% or better.