SpamExperts vs Mailchannels for outgoing spam filtering? SpamExperts pricing?

Portal Home > Knowledgebase > Articles Database > SpamExperts vs Mailchannels for outgoing spam filtering? SpamExperts pricing?

Posted by v33usa, 02-23-2016, 09:42 PM
We're a web development agency and we host all of our customers sites in our own dedicated servers and VPSs. Many sites are in Wordpress and as you can guess, they get compromised despite everything we do to secure both the server and the WP install itself. Currently we use a set of Exim rules that routes our most important clients's emails through Sendgrid and Mandrill. It has worked great, but I cannot route the entire server through them as if one account gets compromised and pushes thousands of spammy emails through SendGrid/Mandrill, it will affect our important customers as well and possibly get us banned.. I've read about MailChannels and to my understanding, if we hire their service, we won't need Sendgrid or Mandrill anymore, and we would route all of our server's outbound email through them in the same way we already do with Sendgrid and Mandrill.. MailChannels would then take care of identifying the abusing emails and only charge us for the legit emails that were sent. Is that right? From what I could gather, SpamExperts can do the same thing, however I don't like the fact that I cannot find their pricing anywhere in their website. Could someone tell me what you are currently paying for SpamExperts? And last of all, based on experience, which one of those services are you currently using on your servers, and how has it been doing so far? Thank you
Posted by JoseDieguez, 02-23-2016, 11:12 PM
From my experience, mailchannels is a good product, using their service in a few servers, and it just works. their support tough has been slower than what i could say acceptable (if a client can't send e-mail for false positive, you can't tell them "amm.. wait 24-48 hours for the mailchannels response", but you can also specify his account to send the mail trough the server until it gets solved). Spamexperts, are very recommended trough many shared-reseller hosting providers, but their "sales dept" it's awful, i have contacted them 3 times, every time i get different quotes, from 250 dolars MINIMUM per month to a 650 usd deposit and 100 dolars minimum spent per month. When i told them i was going to mailchannels then they offered some really low prices and facilities of payment, bla bla, i just ignored them, i hate those that play with prices to see "how much can get from the client", instead of having public or at least standar prices.
Posted by CentexHosting, 02-23-2016, 11:13 PM
i would go with mail channels you can set up and use the cloud version and save you a little money. But this is a good servers to help protect your ip on the server. I have used them and would recommend it.
Posted by WebGuyz, 02-24-2016, 01:31 AM
Was using Mandrillapp and moved to Mailchannels. Mailchannels counts all emails they receive from your server as part of your quota. But they do not forward spam so your IP's are protected and won't get blacklisted. Also they will send bounce messages to your customers which is something Mandrillapp did not do. We have hundreds of domains we deliver email for so Mailchannels really was a good fit for us and we are very happy with it. You can opt to receive emails with the ip and domain of the blocked spam and that helps identify who is generating it and give you a chance to stop it quickly instead of finding out days later. Mailchannels has a very good spam filtering system. All in all a good experience.
Posted by v33usa, 02-24-2016, 03:51 PM
Thanks for writing your experience! Mailchannels definitely looks good, I'm just still a little concerned compromised sites. In a shared hosting environment, if we have a site that gets compromised and starts sending spam, does Mailchannels detect that and stops counting the spam sent towards the monthly quota? Or maybe disables that individual email account in cPanel? I am worried about sites that get compromised and send thousands of spammy emails to the mail queue within minutes. This could easily skyrocket our costs and it would be really good if Mailchannels could detect that, and block that mail account from sending emails so that we don't have thousands of spammy emails driving our costs super high. cPanel now supports disabling individual email accounts, instead of having to disable the whole cPanel account like it was before. Thanks!
Posted by Kingfish85, 02-24-2016, 03:55 PM
Disabling the email account only works if it's SPAM being sent from the actual email account. If it's a compromised site using a script to send SPAM, disabling the email accounts won't do anything. You can modify the Exim configuration though to block at the domain level. I've never used Mailchannels, but do use SpamExperts on a large number of servers for outgoing filtering & it works great.
Posted by v33usa, 02-24-2016, 04:36 PM
That makes sense. Thank you for clarifying! Is it possible to route SMTP/Webmail emails through Mailchannels, and PHP script's emails through the server itself?
Posted by DigitalFyre, 02-24-2016, 04:40 PM
@OP, we've been using SpamExperts for in/outbound filtering and so far it's been great. Pricing seems a lot better than MailChannels too.
Posted by Kingfish85, 02-24-2016, 04:40 PM
I am not sure how Mailchannels works. We configure everything to route via smarthost, so "all" emails are routed through the filters no matter what.
Posted by WPCYCLE, 02-24-2016, 05:57 PM
The thread is focused around spam/mail, but doesn't seem to address to root issue....WordPress. From the accounts that had issues; - WordPress up to date? - trusted plugins? - trusted themes? - weak passwords? - ftp...sftp? - any type of contact forms that allow file submissions? - is the server itself safe? - are the domains separated in their own account, or do some share accounts like an aad-on domain? When you tracked down the issue, was the file or account cleaned? Was the owner of the account contacted about the situation and were they able to correct anything they may have been doing related to the issue? If the root cause isn't looked into, finding a solution that only addresses the end results is basically a band-aid fix...which can become expensive depending on the band-aid.
Posted by v33usa, 02-24-2016, 06:17 PM
Yes, everything you listed is addressed. We do buy all of our themes and plugins, but that alone doesn't cover everything. Joomla for instance has caused us a lot more problems than Wordpress but we cannot just drop support for it as we host whole CRM and Intranet systems based on it. Even trusted plugins have their flaws, as he have had Revolution Slider, which has 91k sales on CodeCanyon, being installed and updated to the latest version and still had vulnerable code (this has happened many times, and with many other plugins too). File uploads are scanned by CXS and Maldet, we use Comodo's ModSecurity rules, and no domains have addon domains. We use keyword based monitoring tools to monitor all the sites to identify the ones that get compromised/defaced, however identifying phishing and spam is still hard for us to do. When they do get hacked, we restore the clean version from our R1Soft backups. Even doing all of this, we still eventually have to deal with sites being hacked Our customers are heavy email users and most don't even care if their site is down for a few hours, as long as they can still use their email accounts. However blacklist removal is mostly not under our control, and can take many days depending on the blacklist. Google Apps is impractical for most of them due to the amount of inboxes needed, unfortunately. I do agree with you that before looking into MailChannels/SpamExperts to solve spam problem, we have to look into the root problem first. However in my point of view, there isn't much more we could do to prevent spam and compromised sites from happening.
Posted by Kingfish85, 02-24-2016, 06:20 PM
If anything, something like Mailchannels or SpamExperts would give you a buffer to track down the issue without having to worry about the SPAM actually getting out, at least the bulk of it. SpamExperts is very good at blocking outbound SPAM.
Posted by WPCYCLE, 02-24-2016, 06:35 PM
Sadly it's true when it comes to this. I've seen cases where a theme/plugin could list 2000 sales, and have 19000 complaints and multiple suggestions for refunds and being delisted. Some "designers" just should not use the word designer. Google Apps is and was great, but I too have found it to be impracticable when it comes to larger needs. If it's within your resources, why not build a server just for emails. Have a management team or your team set it up...secure it...and only use it for emails....while the sites stay on the current server. It will almost eliminate any blacklisting issues, and allows you to lock down email/mail on the website server.
Posted by WebGuyz, 02-24-2016, 06:43 PM
How about using SMTP instead of php mailer for contact forms and such on web pages. This way they have to put in an id and password for authentication. Disable mail in php which is what hacked sites use. Most newer contact forms have that option.
Posted by WPCYCLE, 02-24-2016, 08:08 PM
That makes sense, but it's not the hosts' job to implement that on the site....and say there's a large amount of sites. Plus...when have customers listened to hosts suggestions? Forcing something on them...even if it's for their own good just makes them run and say bad things about the host not realzing they're getting free help
Posted by kpmedia, 02-24-2016, 09:38 PM
SpamExperts is awesome. If you get a license from Veerotech, the outgoing filter is $20/server/month. That's NOT expense at all.
Posted by Kingfish85, 02-24-2016, 09:47 PM
Thanks for the mention here. I should clarify though, that is only available on servers hosted with us that are managed due to configuration & support reasons.
Posted by v33usa, 02-24-2016, 10:16 PM
We actually tested doing something like this by having 1 cPanel VPS only for emails. The problem was that we no longer could manage the email accounts on the same server as the website was hosted, and clients would no longer be able to login to their webmail using domain.com/webmail unless we modified Apache on all the servers :/ We have though about this, however we use many different scripts for development and many of them do not support SMTP authentication, disabling PHP's Mail() server-wide is just impratical.. One thing that we might do though is, make a custom PHP version with CloudLinux's PHP selector, and disable PHP's mail() function, and assign this PHP version to the wesites we have using SMTP authentication for sending email. We'll see how it goes. This is exactly why disabling PHP's Mail function server-wide would be impractical. :cries: - Thanks for clarifying, was about to order a license. @Thread: We got a trial account with both SpamExperts and MailChannels, currently testing both.
Posted by Kingfish85, 02-24-2016, 10:29 PM
No worries. I can see that your ticket was answered with that as well. It has also been updated on the website in addition as to not cause confusion. SpamExperts will get you set up and working, I think you'll be happy with the results once it's fully configured.
Posted by vps_newbie, 02-25-2016, 10:43 AM
As an end user of a hosting service that switched to MailChannels, I am not impressed with it. We had perfect, ultra-reliable email until our hosting service switched to MailChannels. We never received notice of the switch. I found out about it when I detected that a small percentage of our outbound email was being dropped without notification. Ours is a small family domain, and we never send spam, nor do we send any bulk email or have any email lists, but email reliability is very important to us. It is very hard to detect when you send an email message and it does not arrive to its destination, because most people do not reply, "I got it" to every message you send. By the time you detect that a message has been lost (e.g., waiting a long time for a reply that you never get), the lost message has rolled off the MailChannels logs.
Posted by WebGuyz, 02-25-2016, 02:29 PM
v33usa, Let us know who you ultimately go with and your criteria. Thanks!
Posted by v33usa, 07-21-2016, 12:12 PM
After a lot of testing, I'm actually having the same problem with both providers: their ainti spam filter is blocking legitimate emails from being delivered. The worse part is, I neither of them allow me to whitelist senders, or to bypass their spam filter and let the messages be delivered anyway. It's also not possible to see the emails that were blocked by their spam filter and force them to be delivered. They end up being lost. This is a big problem for me, unfortunatelly I had to suspend the use of both services due to this This is exactly what's happenning, surprisingly on both services, MailChanells and SpamExperts.. What's the point of using a service like this if you keep getting false positives, and have no way to deal with them?
Posted by UH-Bobby, 07-21-2016, 12:48 PM
I used to use MailChannels. I was disappointed with it, mainly because we kept getting bounced. IE, the health of their IPs were not good. I was also limited on what I could do, etc. The features weren't there. So, I switched to SpamWall, which was a great provider, but didn't really have the integration I was looking for with cPanel. I switched then to SpamExperts, and I've absolutely loved it. For the OP, tell your provider to allow you to release outbound, it's a permission, and it's grantable. You can't release and train, but you can release. Thanks!
Posted by JoseDieguez, 09-16-2016, 02:16 AM
What about using both? Mailchannels for Out SpamExperts for In

Add to Favourites Print this Article