Cost of the service is $2 per month. This is an optional service, you are not required to have filtering. Please call 877-6612 or use this Signup Form to get your account set up.

FAQ's
Q: How does this work?
A: All hamsfork.net mail will be passed through a third party filtering service with default filters set to "none". When you activate your filters your mail will be filtered appropriately. The filter will ad less than 1 second of latency to e-mail service.

Q: Why are you charging for this when other ISP's do it for free?
A: Very few ISP's filter mail and even fewer do it for free. The ones who do have customer bases large enough to support the expense of the necessary computers and software. Filtering systems are computationally intensive and quite expensive, multiple clustered serves are a must. Our affiliation with US Online allows us to lease this service at a reasonable cost but it is not low enough for us to justify it as a free service.

Q: Why should I pay when I can filter myself?
A: 85% of all viruses are e-mail borne. Many clients forget to update their virus scanner databases and are vulnerable despite having good software installed. An untimely update puts you at risk. $2 per month is much cheaper than the cost of recovering an infected system or having your personal data spread over the Internet by a malicious Virus or Trojan. This alone makes it cost justifiable. Probably the favorite reason our clients have decided to filter is to prevent porn from showing up in their mail box for their children to accidentally see. Having your e-mail address sold between spammers is getting to be quite a problem and filtering it is the only solution. Requesting from a spammer that you not receive their junk mail only serves to validate your address and insures that it will remain on lists already out there. Filtering it and never responding to it helps to get your address off of those lists and protects young eyes from inappropriate material. The Server Side SPAM Filter prevents both Viruses AND SPAM from ever reaching your mailbox, you never have to download Viruses or SPAM again.

Q: Is it a pain to set up and control?
A: No. You activate and control your filters with a simple on-line interface. Mail which has been quarantined as SPAM or Virus Infected can be viewed by you before it is deleted. You can then decide what to do with the suspect mail. For instance, many list serve mails will be quarantined, you will probably want to allow some of these through. For the first month or two you will need to watch the quarantine to customize your settings, after that a periodic e-mail will notify you to check your quarantine before it is deleted. Quarantined items will be deleted after 15 days.

Q: Do I need to reconfigure my system?
A: No. All filtering is done by the mail server, no changes are necessary on your system.

Q: Sounds Good! What DO I need to do?
A: Mash THIS LINK and fill out the form. We'll contact you with instructions.

ANNOUNCEMENT!! 7/15/2002
Due to the excellent response we have had from the use of the SPAM filtering we have implemented Virus Scanning for all mail accounts at no cost.