After you have completed the order and setup process you may be wondering what to expect next.
By default, the Catch-all feature is enabled for your domain, meaning that SpamHero will accept email that is sent to any address on the domain. When we receive a "good" message we'll deliver it to your domain and mark the address as one that we should accept mail for in the future.
You can review which recipient email addresses we've detected so far by signing in to your control panel and going to Settings -> Email Recipients and then clicking on the Detected tab.
Or, you can also provide a list of email addresses that are valid for your domain by signing in to your control panel and going to Settings -> Email Recipients and clicking on the Add New button on the Approved tab.
Most users will see a drastic reduction in spam within the first hour or two from the time their domain is fully setup. However, because of the way the internet works, it can take up to 72 hours before all of the mail servers around the world begin sending your domain's mail through our filter.
Yes, you can setup a private quarantine for your users so that they can review spam that was sent to their address (or set of addresses). The quarantine user logins are limited to the Quarantine and the Dashboard. You can also setup a single quarantine for a group of users to share (sales@, jim@, mary@, bob@). In this case, the group of users will share the same password and 2 factor authentication code (if 2 factor authentication is enabled).
Users can also have Quarantine Reports sent to them on an hourly, daily or weekly basis so that they can review and release quarantined messages directly from their own email software.
If your mail server uses LDAP or Active Directory, we recommend using that and disabling the catch-all feature: Using Active Directory (Exchange) or LDAP to set up valid email addresses
Without the catch-all feature, you would need to maintain a list of valid email recipients that SpamHero should accept mail for, and any email for an address you do not add in the SpamHero control panel would be rejected.
However, when you have the catch-all feature enabled, SpamHero will accept mail for all possible email addresses for your domain, so you do not have to maintain a list of valid addresses.
The catch-all feature is enabled by default on all domains, but can be disabled if you choose.
If you find that you are receiving a large amount of messages for invalid recipients that are causing your account to go over the message limit and receive overage charges, you may want to consider disabling the catch-all, as messages to unknown recipients will no longer count against your total when the catch-all is disabled.
For most cases, however, leaving the catch-all on is not likely to lead to overage charges on its own.
When the catch-all feature is enabled, any messages sent to a recipient that our system has not seen before will be initially deferred (also known as "greylisting". When email is coming from a valid sender, the sending server will automatically immediately retry the message resulting in a very brief delay in delivery for the first message sent to a new recipient (usually less than a minute).
Because spammer's mail servers are focused on sending email very fast to as many users as possible, they will usually skip recipients with greylisting enabled. This protects your domain from having a bunch of invalid email addresses added as recipients in SpamHero, especially when a spammer executes a dictionary attack against your domain.
Disabling the catch-all feature will also disable greylisting automatically. If you wish to leave the catch-all enabled but want greylisting disabled, contact our support team for assistance. Be aware that having greylisting disabled while the catch-all is enabled may result in a large number of invalid email addresses being detected as valid.
If a single recipient listed on an email is unrecognized, the message will be greylisted. If there are multiple unrecognized recipients, the delivery of the message can be delayed significantly.
Unfortunately, even after switching your MX records, some spammers will continue to send spam directly to your mail server. To prevent this, be sure to check out our article on how to Prevent spam from getting around the filter. This step is not required to use SpamHero, but we recommend it.