Our network…
With over 8 years of development, fine tuning and enhancement behind it, our network provides the ultimate in clean, safe, email environments – whether it’s processing and filtering email for our range of hosted email solutions, or providing external filtering for the email feed to your in-house email servers.
Our email processing and filtering is dual-homed in secure, state-of-the-art, data centres in Telehouse, London and BlueSquare, Milton Keynes.
Divide and conquer
We have broken down the delivery process into specific tasks and then dedicated server clusters to those tasks. For example, if hosting a POP3 mailbox on our servers, a typical set of tasks may be as follows:
| Event | Server | Tasks |
| Inbound SMTP connection | Relay Cluster | Basic anti-spam checks; accept email into system |
| Scanning | Anti-Spam Cluster | Check content and quarantine if required |
| Scanning | Anti-Virus Cluster | Scan mail body and attachments for viruses |
| Storage | Mail Storage Cluster | Route email for storage |
| Retrieval | POP3 | Fetches email from mailstore using POP3 |
As you can see, each cluster looks after a specific part of the process. This is done so we can fine-tune the performance of each type of server to the job in hand rather than create ‘jacks of all trades’. Above is only a selection of the clusters we have in place.
Intelligent filtering
In order to provide the highest possible levels of filtering performance we use multi-layered combination of best-of-breed anti-spam and anti-virus data sources and platforms:
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Modular architecture
For each server cluster, we can add in additional servers to increase capacity at very short notice. Each server has at least one opposite number sharing the load and removing any single point of failure. Many clusters have large numbers of servers to increase throughput and performance. We also have the ability to transform one server type into another, allowing us to keep spare servers ‘on standby’ to join a cluster that suddenly requires more capacity or has suffered a server failure.
Monitoring and integrity
We take data integrity very seriously. We backup all email stored on the system every night, which is especially useful for end users using IMAP. Every server we use has mirrored drives. All aspects of the system, from network activity to hard disk health, is constantly monitored. Any alerts are relayed to our support team who are on call 24/7/365.
Scaleable
Optimised for growth, our network currently supports over 150,000 users and filters in excess of 8 million emails a day.
Latest News
We’re delighted to announce that our Zimbra servers have all been upgraded to Zimbra 7. Listed below are a few of the benefits – for a more detailed overview take a look at the Zimbra Enhancements document.
- Support for 64bit Outlook 2010
- Documents have merged with ‘Briefcase’
- Support for ‘Send later’ in webmail
- Better mobile phone support
- Enhanced compatibility with a number of web browsers
If you need any additional information on our Zimbra service please let us know.
Testimonials
“No hardware upgrades, no software upgrades and no worrying if our servers are offline: our email platform is one less thing for us to worry about and we can now get on with running the rest of our business.”
Philip English, Director at Utilis
www.utilistechnology.com
“We are delighted with the choice we made in The Very Good Email Company. The solution has met our communications needs, enabled us to reduce costs compared to a managed, in-house solution and the levels of support we’ve had have been great.”
Mark Taft, Community Trade Union
www.community-tu.org/
