3rd party spam filter, one email address

[flamewalker]

I don't know if this is possible or not... as generally I know you would assign the MX records to the 3rd party server, which would affect all mail.

What I'm wondering is if there is some trick someone knows of that can send a single email address on a domain to the third party spam server we are wanting to investigate, before we send all nearly 500 email addresses to at once!

Thanks in advance!

 

[nobaloney]

No. Because there's no way to read the email to see who it's from before sending it to an IP#. And you can't even do it for a certain IP#, because DNS is a distributed database; you have no control over which server sees the request from the sender.

Jeff

 

[flamewalker]

Yeah I was sure that was the case... I guess we could forward the specific emails to our .net domain (ie [email protected] => [email protected]) and forward the MX to that domain, to the 3rd party server for doing a trial run? Does that sound reasonable?

 

[zEitEr]

I guess we could forward the specific emails to our .net domain (ie [email protected] => [email protected]) and forward the MX to that domain, to the 3rd party server for doing a trial run? Does that sound reasonable?

Yes, it does, at least for me. In the situation I would try the same.

 

[nobaloney]

Whether or not that's a fair test will depend on how the third-party filter works. If it filters on content it should be a good test, but if it filters or blocks based on the RealTime BlockLists (such as we do with SpamBlocker, the test won't be good, as all the emails will be coming from your server, not the original servers, which may be in blocklists. And of course the spam filter service may score forwarded emails differently.

I'd suggest speaking with the service's salesrep to see if s/he has any ideas as to how to test.

Jeff

 

[flamewalker]

Whether or not that's a fair test will depend on how the third-party filter works. If it filters on content it should be a good test, but if it filters or blocks based on the RealTime BlockLists (such as we do with SpamBlocker, the test won't be good, as all the emails will be coming from your server, not the original servers, which may be in blocklists. And of course the spam filter service may score forwarded emails differently.

I'd suggest speaking with the service's salesrep to see if s/he has any ideas as to how to test.

Jeff

Aha... good point. Hadn't thought of that. I believe it is content based, but I'm not 100% certain.

Thanks for the good tips!