## Frequently Asked Questions Will using D2S slow down my email system? What about security? Do I get all my mail? Does anyone read my mail? Does my mail change? How reliable is the D2S system? How accurate is the D2S system? How much space does it require on my hard disk? How about my current email settings? Why does D2S use a server-based filter? Will my mail get lost if the D2S system is down? Can my email program automatically throw spam in the trash? What about the "my junk is your important message" problem? OK, but what the heck is Spam? What's the difference between SMTP and POP? Will using D2S slow down my email system? Death2Spam operates virtually invisibly and is transparent to the user. Our testing metrics show that the average time taken to retrieve your mail, check for spam and pass it on to you is about 100 milliseconds for the average-sized email message. In practice, you probably won't notice any difference in download time, especially if your email reader automatically checks for messages every few minutes. You will notice, however, that 99% of the spam will be tossed in the bin! What about security? Security is always a serious issue. Death2Spam does not store passwords, at any point. Your passwords are totally secure from hacker attacks, and from any enquiry by the D2S system administrators. The system is not, in any case, "hackable". D2S is simply a pass-through (proxy) system. Your email is stored only for a short time so that the system can track any changes you might make to an email's classification against the original email. For increased security and privacy, our web server provides HTTPS access via an encrypted socket, and our web application doesn't store any "cookies" on your PC. If you have any other security-related questions, please contact us by email. Do I get all my mail? Absolutely! Death2Spam is simply a pass-through system. All mail (except viruses) is sent to you regardless of its classification. Once you know what type of mail it is, it's up to you to get rid of it (or keep it) as you wish. After you've trained the system for a time, and you're confident that it knows your preferences, you can elect to have any spam "quarantined" on the server, where it's available for inspection via the D2S web site. This can save considerably on download time and associated costs. Does anyone read my mail? Death2Spam is an automated Internet Application Service that requires minimal human intervention. Your email is never read unless you are experiencing a problem with a particular message, and then only with your explicit permission, in order to solve the problem. If you have any other privacy-related concerns, please read our Privacy Statement Does my mail change? Except for the classification "tag" that appears in the subject field of some email messages, there are no other visible changes. Some additional information is inserted in the message headers, for performance tuning and diagnostic purposes. How reliable is the D2S system? We're seriously aiming for 99.99% uptime. And so far, we've succeeded! Our servers are housed by professional Server Hosting companies, with uninterruptable power supplies, regular data backups, triple network redundancy, all that good stuff. How accurate is the D2S system? Analysis of hundreds of thousands of messages shows that, on average, Death2Spam identifies viruses, spam, porn and junk mail with better than 99.5% accuracy! In fact, head-to-head comparison testing with other anti-spam products shows D2S to be the most accurate spam-recognition software available in the world! How much space does it require on my hard disk? Not one byte! The application sits on a remote server and, as it is a "pass-through" or proxy system, no desktop software is needed. Your own computer is not involved in the process. How about my current email settings? Except for the minor changes in your email program settings which allows Death2Spam to retrieve, filter and forward your mail, no other modifications are made. Your email software continues to function exactly as before. Why does D2S use a server-based filter? There are some very compelling reasons for this: a zero storage footprint on your PC (no software is installed); no software upgrades are ever needed (there's nothing to download); you're always using the latest version of the filtering software; you have access to a globally-pooled spam and virus database (incredible accuracy); 100% cross-platform compatibility (works on any PC, Mac, WebTV, etc); and a web-based client interface means you can easily access your account from any PC, anywhere. Will my mail get lost if the D2S system is down? No. Mail is collected from your normal mail server and passed through to you immediately. If the Death2Spam server has a problem, your mail is simply not collected and cannot, therefore, get lost. Our policy is to never lose anyone's email! Can my email program automatically throw spam in the trash? You bet! See the instructions on our "Getting Rid of Junk Mail" help page. What about the "my junk is your important message" problem? Shouldn't a well-trained personal collection be more useful than a large multi-person collection? Yes and no. The Death2Spam database is currently >99% accurate for the average user. It contains word-probability analysis from a vast number of email messages. And it does the basic job really well, for most people. OK, but what the heck is Spam? Spam is the title of the method used by certain nasty folk in flooding the Internet with a vast number of copies of the same email, in an attempt to force that message on people who aren't even remotely interested in receiving it. Most spam is just bulk commercial advertising, but there's also an increasing amount of (highly explicit) porn spam! Spammers pay very little to send this junk. Most of the costs are paid by the hapless recipients... Junk email picks out individual users with messages advertising products or services. Spam address lists are created by raiding Internet mailing lists, trawling the internet for addresses, or by simply buying a CD containing millions of email addresses. Spam emails typically costs the user money to receive them. Most people -- those with an internet account based on the volume of information received, or the amount of time online -- get their mail (including all the spam), and the costs are added to the cost of the service. In addition, it costs a lot for Internet Service Providers to send you spam. These costs are generally passed on to the service user -- you! What's the difference between SMTP and POP? SMTP, short for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, is an Internet protocol for sending email messages between servers. Most email systems that send mail over the Internet use SMTP to send messages from one server to another. These messages can then be retrieved with an email client using either POP or IMAP. In addition, SMTP is generally used to send messages from a mail client to a mail server. This is why you need to specify both the POP or IMAP server and the SMTP server when you configure your email application. POP is an acronym for Post Office Protocol, and is used to retrieve messages from a mail server. Most email applications (sometimes called an email client or an email reader program) use the POP protocol, although some can also use the newer IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol). There are two versions of POP. The first, POP2, became a standard in the mid-80's and requires SMTP to send messages. The newer version, POP3, can be used with or without SMTP.

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