If you have a his.com or hers.com email address, check the settings in your email software (smartphone/tablet/laptop/computer/etc.) and make sure that mail.his.com is set as the hostname for both incoming and outgoing mail.  This has always been the correct setting, but for legacy reasons, using just his.com as the hostname has worked too.  Starting October 5, 2013, only mail.his.com will work as the hostname for his.com and hers.com users.

This change is being made for anti-spam reasons.  Some spammers (millions of them, actually) will attempt to bypass spam filtering by ignoring the official mail exchanger records in DNS and connecting to the hostname that resolves to the domain name.  We’re able to block most of this, but we need to block it all.

Summary:

• this affects only users with his.com or hers.com email addresses.
• check the settings in the email software on all your devices and make sure that mail.his.com is set as the hostname for both incoming and outgoing email.

We’ve been scanning the logs, and we think we’ve identified most of the folks who this applies to, and we’ve sent email everyone who we know needs to make the change.

his.com and hers.com users can access webmail as always at https://webmail.his.com

If you have any questions or need assistance, open a support ticket at https://support.his.com/contact

spam.his.com is doing an excellent job of blocking spam without stopping non-spam – the only false positives we’re seeing involve mail from bulk sources (overstock.com, alert.ema.dc.gov, etc., where many messages with the same content come in at once, which is characteristic of spam – you may find that you need to whitelist these if they’re winding up in your quarantine.

The system is also learning, as we’ve had time now to train it with feedback about what’s actually spam and not-spam – we update this Bayesian database daily, and this helps fine-tune filtering accuracy.

Two major improvements over Postini:  little, if any, non-spam mail getting quarantined, and much faster reaction to new spam attacks that use new methods to get around filters.  Barracuda updates its filters three times/hour, vs. once every day or two on Postini, and we’ve seen the effect of this in action – it works.

We’ve made a few minor changes – you’ll no longer see mail marked “?SPAM?” in your inbox.  This was mail that Barracuda thought it might be spam but wasn’t sure so it didn’t quarantine it, but tagged it and passed it through.  In practice, we found that as much non-spam as spam getting tagged, so this tagging wasn’t helpful and we’ve turned it off. These messages are still passed through, but without the tag.

Zimbra users:  you have another layer of spam/virus/phishing filtering in Zimbra.  Mail that Zimbra thinks is spam will be put in your Junk folder, and this is separate from what spam.his.com does.  Check your Junk folder from time to time, and if any mail is there that isn’t spam, mark it as not-spam (you have to do this via webmail).  Likewise, if any spam gets past spam.his.com and you find it in your inbox, you can mark it as spam.  Zimbra’s spam filter learns from your feedback, and if you mark spam/not-spam for a week or two, its accuracy will improve.  Zimbra’s spam filter works at the individual mailbox level, so you do need to train it so it knows whether you agree with what it’s doing.

If you want, you can forward spam that gets to your inbox to spam@barracuda.com – this will help them recognize new spam tricks and update their filters.

If you have any questions, open a support ticket by clicking “Open a Ticket” at http://info.his.com/support/support.his.com.html.  Check our knowledgebase articles at https://support.his.com/kb/kb/browse/001925

We provide spam and virus filtering with all email accounts – you really can’t use email without it anymore.

We’ve used Postini for our premium spam filtering since 2001 (twelve years!).  Google bought Postini in 2007, and Postini continued to be excellent until about a year ago when we noticed that things were slipping – there were outages, a lot of mail that wasn’t spam started to get quarantined, things like that.  Then Google decided to discontinue Postini, along with quite a few other services.

We evaluated seven good alternatives, and Barracuda was the clear winner.  The spam/virus filtering is excellent – they push out updates to the filtering rules as often as three times / hour, so they do a great job of catching spam blasts that use new techniques to around the filters, and most people will find that they have few, if any ‘false positives’ (non-spam that gets quarantined).   We’ve been testing the Barracuda system and using it for our own email since February, and we think you’ll find it a real improvement.  We’re operating the Barracuda servers in our own cloud, so we have direct control of uptime and reliability.

We’re switching domains over in groups, and should have everybody switched by May 18.  You’ll get email announcing the change before your domain is switched.  The change will be almost completely transparent to you – the only real change you’ll have to make is the link to your spam quarantine, which will be in the announcement email.