Network

Do you know where your email is hosted?
Our network is 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 platform is homed in a secure, state-of-the-art, data centre in Pulsant (formerly BlueSquare), Milton Keynes (Tier 4) – an ISO 27001 certified hosting environment.

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 IMAP Fetches email from mailstore using IMAP

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:

email spam assasin
Clam AV Anti-Virus

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.