Email and Spam Traffic Management

[sangiro 4]

Heya all,

We are constantly looking for ways to improve and speed up our free email service on Dropzone.com. As with any free mail service spam is a major concern. While we have pretty strong spam-filtering software in place we still have to process every message sent to a dropzone.com email address to determine whether it is spam or not. This loads our servers and drains server resources that ultimately lead to performance issues across the entire site.

The following 2 changes that will take effect immediately to help reduce the total amount of spam that gets processed by our mail server and cut down on the number of spam messages already in the system:

1) Email accounts inactive for longer than 6 months will be suspended

We will suspend the email accounts (NOT the user account) of members who have not used their Dropzone.com Email account for more than 6 months. This simply means that if you're not using the free email service on Dropzone.com that we will stop processing mail targeted to your account - until you start using it again. All email in a suspended account will remain in the account but no new mail sent to that address will be processed or accepted.

Your Dropzone.com account will not be effected at all and you'll be able to use the rest of the site as usual. To activate your account again, simply click on the "Email" link in the navigation bar at the top of any page. The moment you do so your account will start receiving mail again for as long as it is not left dormant for 6 months or longer.

2) Messages older than 30 days in "Spam" folders will be purged

We will start running a nightly process that will check all messages in the "Spam" folders of all our active user accounts. Messages in those folders that are older than 30 days will be purged from the system and deleted permanently.

These twos steps will dramatically reduce the number of messages we need to process, and cut down on the number of spam messages that exist on our servers at any given time. For those of you who use the Dropzone.com Mail application on a "regular basis" (more than once every 6 months!), this will have absolutely no impact on you... things may just seem a little faster, cleaner and smoother.

Safe swoops
Sangiro