General

How does APM Gateway work?
APM Gateway is a remote email filter. Instead of being directly delivered to your server, emails are first delivered to our data center. All emails are tested for spam or virus content. Only the emails you want are then forwarded to your network for delivery as normal.

What do I need?
We forward email on as a standard SMTP stream, so you need to be running an SMTP email server that can receive email for your domains.

Do I need a server to run APM Gateway on?
No. APM Gateway is remotely hosted service. You do not need any hardware or software.

I only have one email address, is this right for me?
Probably not, this service is intended for anyone who runs their own email server.

Licensing and Legal

See also our Pricing and Payment page.

How is APM Gateway licensed?
The service is licensed on a 'per user' basis. A user is defined as any one person that can receive email to a unique mailbox. We do not count 'generic' email addresses such as 'sales@' or 'info@' in the license count. So, if you have 20 people who receive emails, you need a 20-user license. Licenses are available in multiples of 5, with 5 being the minimum purchase.

How much does it cost?
We operate a very simple pricing policy. Have a look at our Pricing Guide.

Do you do domain-based licensing?
Not at this time. It would be unfair to charge the same rate to a small business with 5 emails as for a large business with 300.

Can I change my license?
Anytime you wish and in any direction.

How do you take payment?
We accept all major credit cards. Payments are taken monthly in advance. You can also pay by monthly invoice if you prefer.

What is the minimum contract term?
There is no minimum contract term but bear in mind that refunds will not be given for partital use of a month.

Do you do a free trial?
Yes! Every new subscriber gets the first 30 days free of charge. If you do not wish to continue, close your account before the date of first payment and no charges will be incurred. Signup

Do I have control over my regular credit card payments?
Always. We setup a WorldPay FuturePay agreement. This automatically debits your credit card monthly on our behalf. You can stop payments at any time directly on the WorldPay site.

Why do you use WorldPay for credit cards?
WorldPay have a great reputation for secure on-line payments. The company is operated by the Royal Bank of Scotland. We want to offer you the best solution for payment, and we believe this is it.

Will I get a VAT receipt?
Yes. Every month you will receive a notification from WorldPay that your card has been debited. Shortly after you will receive a VAT invoice directly from us.

Do you store my credit card details?
No, all that is handled by WorldPay. We never even see your credit card details.

Protection

How does the spam filter work?
Our filter performs several hundred tests on each message. These look at language, origin of message, its structure and path taken through the Internet so far. The resulting 'scores' are added up and then compared with your settings. If the score passes a preset threshold, the message is deemed 'spam'.

How does the virus filter work?
Our filter looks for viruses in attachments or embedded within the email structure itself.

Do you write your own proprietary filters?
No. We use industry standard software that has been held to account in the public forum. This may we know we are using effective software. SpamAssassin, our spam filter, is community-developed, which ensures that a diverse range of people are working towards making it the best spam filter available.

Our virus filter is provided by Kaspersky Labs, a world-renowned leader in virus protection software that specialises in Unix-based solutions.

Does it delay my email?
It will depend on the size of the email of course, but our tests have shown an average on 2 seconds delay in email delivery times.

Does the spam filter delete emails?
No, it quarantines them. You can view your spam quarantine online and have the option to restore messages that have been mistakenly caught.

What if I want to download spam and filter it locally?
No problem. We can forward all mail on and mark spam with a specific header. Simply filter this header locally to detect what is spam.

What if the spam filter traps a valid message?
Regretablly, there is no definitive test to determine spam, only very well educated assessments. Occasionally, a valid mail may be caught although this is exceedingly rare. Should this happen, you can restore the message by viewing it in the Quarantine area of your web-based control panel. You can also use whitelists to prevent this happening on specific domains or addresses.

Do you alert the sender of a virus?
No. Typically, the sender of an email-based worm is a fake address anyway.

Can I switch alerts off?
Yes. We can protect you silently.

How often do you update your virus detection drivers?
Every 15 minutes, 24/7/365.

What other protection methods are available?
We also offer blacklists and whitelists. These are lists of email addresses that can never or always email you respectively.

MX Records and Domains

What's an MX record?
A MX (Mail eXchanger) record determines the destination of an email. When an email is sent, the server requests the MX record for the domain (everything after the '@' sign). The record points to the destination server.

Why do I need to change my MX record?
For APM Gateway to work, we must receive your email before it gets to your network. So, we change the MX records to point to our servers and you tell us where to deliver email to.

How do I change my MX record?
We cannot do it for you as we do not own the domain name. You must ask your ISP or whoever registered the domain name and manages it on your behalf. We'll give you a sample email to send to them, so don;t worry about getting the jargon right!

I have multiple domains, is there an extra charge?
No. You can associate up to 50 domains with your account at no additional charge.

Security and Integrity

How do I stop direct delivery of viruses to my server?
Even with APM Gateway, some more devious worms will try and connect directly to your server, ignoring MX records. We will advise you to only ever accept connections from our servers by configuring your email server and/or firewall.

Can I test your systems?
Yes. After signup you will have access to our diagnostic area on the web site. You can run several tests to ensure our servers are operating correctly and your account is correctly configured.

Do you read or copy my email?
No. Never. We process literally millions of emails every day and see it as our task to get them scanned and off our network as soon as possible.

What happens if my server breaks?
We will queue up your email for up to 30 days. You won't lose a thing.

Is APM's infrastructure up to the job?
We've spent a lot of time developing an infrastructure that is capable of dealing with constantly growing email traffic. We operate two systems, both identical and comprised of numerous server 'farms' (small groups of servers acting as one). Each farm has a specific task such as spam scanning, SMTP delivery, connection marshalling and so on. The farms link together to form the processing 'chain', from receipt to delivery. This entire system is then duplicated in the second infrastructure, providing both load-balancing and fault tolerance. If a member of a farm should fail, the system keeps running. If an entire system is knocked out, the other system takes over. These systems are based in Telehouse London, the very heart of the UK Internet. Monitoring is peformed by a number of system 24/7 with technical staff on-site and on standby around the clock.

My question is not answered here...
Sorry about that! Please send an email to support@apm-gateway.net and we'll answer it for you.