Outgoing Filtering

Mail Assure's Outgoing Filtering facility is used to relay your organization's outgoing mail securely and efficiently.

The Outgoing Filtering service (used to relay outgoing mail), works independently of the Incoming Filtering facility which is also available with Mail Assure. See Incoming Filtering for more detail.

Mail Assure's outgoing filter is used to filter outbound messages for spam content and should only be used for valid mailboxes. Mail known to not be spam or internal mail should not be routed though the outbound filter.

What is Outgoing Filtering?

Outgoing filtering is the ability to relay mail from a mail server to a recipient via the mail filter to prevent suspicious mail being delivered from your domain.

Outgoing users (authentication methods) in the new UI at Admin level, this is Outgoing > Manage Authentication, are required to authorize mail from a server to relay through the filter (if not blocked by the filter). Locking an outbound authentication method will prevent all mail using that method from being relayed.

Outgoing identities are a way to further sub-devide the traffic to individual users of the system. Locking an identity will prevent all mail from that single sender address from being relayed.

Re-authentication allows multiple mail hosts to utilize the same sending IP address for outbound authentication, whilst still showing logs for the traffic under the correct sending domain in the Outgoing Log Search page (for example, when sending from Microsoft 365).

What do you want to do?

From the Outgoing Filtering sections you can carry out a variety of tasks related to the filtering of your outgoing mail:

  • Getting Started with Outgoing Filtering - See the Quick Start Guide on how you need to get started with outgoing filtering
  • Configure Outgoing Filtering with Exchange Online (Microsoft 365) - Details for configuring outgoing filtering specific to Microsoft 365's Exchange online service
  • Outgoing Spam Monitoring - The different methods by which you can monitor and act on any outgoing spam senders
  • Outgoing Log Search - Filter on outgoing mail and report on the data available
  • View Outgoing Delivery Queue - View emails that are being queued by the filter due to a recipient failure
  • Manage Identities - Manage the identities that are set up for an account. For example, if you see an identity is sending a lot of bad mail, lock their identity from here while investigating the issue, to prevent any further mail being accepted for this identity
  • View Domain Statistics (Outgoing) - Available only at the Domain Level control panel, this page displays statistics of your domain's outgoing email traffic over a selected time frame
  • Manage Outgoing Settings - On the Domain Level Control panel, you may add the domain administrator's contact email and the address to which abuse reports (ARF) are sent
  • Outgoing Users/Authentication Methods - Set up the authenticating users that will allow the outgoing Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) to authenticate mail through the Mail Assure outgoing filter
  • View Outgoing Bandwidth Overview - View graphical representation of outgoing bandwidth usage as a total and per domain. Displays data in the same way as the Incoming Bandwidth overview (see View Incoming Bandwidth Overview)
  • DKIM Certificate Generation - At the Domain Level control panel, generate a DKIM certificate to add a signature to your email headers, for mail which passes through the outbound filter
  • Clear Callout Cache - Outgoing - Manually clear the domain’s outgoing sender verification cache. This tool is especially useful after changing the domain routes, DNS records and for removing the good/bad responses to sender callouts from the sending mail server
  • Outbound Filtering Hostnames - View the Hostnames available for relaying outbound email from your sending Mail Transfer Agent (MTA)
  • Set up SPF - How to configure the SPF records when using the filter to relay outbound mail

All messages filtered through the outgoing filter will be counted towards the filtered mailbox total for the domain and therefore be billable.

There is no option to bypass outgoing filtering if a message is relayed through the filter.