mailhost.realprogrammers.com, the primary mail server features some pretty effective anti-spam measures. Each night I'm sent the mail reject log from the previous day's mail activities. There are usually dozen of rejections. On average I get probably one or two pieces of spam amongst hundreds of legitimate mail and despite having my email address plastered about the 'Net (i.e. well known to spammers who crawl webpages to collect addresses).

Anti-spam service

It's possible to use this service without having mail hosted here nor changing your email settings. It also certainly does not affect your website or any existing hosting arrangements.

A couple of important definitions

In an email address like Jane.Doe@realprogrammers.com,

Jane.Doe

...is called the local part

realprogrammers.com

...is the domain

How to make use of this

Example 1: your mail is forwarded to a free account

Let's say you already have a domain domain.example, and two users, louise and dave. Each of those accounts are then forwarded to some yahoomail or ISP account, like louise18326@pacbell.net. To get the lo-spam service running you will need to,

• Tell me about the domain, in this case domain.example, the various local parts, and where to forward them. For my convenience, please send them like,

  louise: louise18326@pacbell.net
  dave: headingtothegravedave@yahoo.com

  You can also have a "catch-all" which makes everything else go to a particular address. I highly recommend not doing this though because sometimes spammers will try to guess addresses, often thousands of them and with a catch-all you will get every single one. I've seen attempts at this trick several times on my machine: this really isn't a theoretical point.
• Set your MX record via your domain registrar or ISP to point to mailhost.realprogrammers.com
• That's it! Mail gets routed through mailhost.realprogrammers.com which then forwards on to the various accounts.

Example 2: your mail is delivered to your own server

This is marginally more tricky because we need an address to forward mail on to; of course if louise@domain.example is headed for the domain.example machine then we can't use louise@domain.example :-). There are two ways of doing this, and I can figure them out so you don't need to worry about it. (If you're curious what I do is test whether the mail will accept mail using its IP address as the domain part, like louise@[64.125.129.70] or perhaps an alternative name for the machine like mail.domain.example; most machines have more than one name but won't necessarily accept mail as that unfortunately).

• Tell me the domain name and list of local parts, exactly as above. Provide it in the same format but with the forwarding address bit blank.
• Go ahead and set the MX record to mailhost.realprogrammers.com, also exactly as above.
• That's it!

So in fact it's the same. If any of this is confusing or needs more explanation please drop me a line!