SPAMCuda Frequently Asked Questions and Answers

What is SPAMCuda?

SPAMCuda is a service of Cuda Systems LLC located in Florida. It is a means to obtain a nearly-spam-free email box for your personal or business use.

Corporate/ISP User?

Click here for corporate information - this software is available both as a "raw" package and as an "appliance."

How does it work?

You sign up for service off the "LOGIN" button to your left. You then register for a control account. This is a unique identifier that allows you to establish, remove, and control as many email accounts, each with their own private spam filter, as you'd like. Each control account is linked to one email address somewhere on the Internet - an address that you should not publicize or make known to others, because of course that would lead it to be spammed!

(Once you have spam-free email here, you can point that control account at one of the SPAMCuda accounts that you have established - but see the caveats below on doing this!)

As each login is added you may specify just a local email box, or, if you prefer, it may be associated with a domain that is under your control. If you associate a domain with an account, you must also arrange for the "MX" records on your domain server to point to the host "mail.spamcuda.net".

Processed mail may be held here, and picked up using Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora, or any other POP3 compatible email program - worldwide! Or, if you prefer, you may have "cleaned" email forwarded to any other email account on the Internet that you would like.

The SPAMCuda system looks at all email that is received for you, and makes a determination on whether or not it is spam based on various criteria which include but are not limited to:

• Is there something wrong with the SMTP protocol transaction itself?
• Is the mail to and from the same address, and did it not originate from the local machine? It is likely spam; spammers frequently stick YOUR address in the "FROM" line in order to trick spam filters into returning it to you! Not nice - but SPAMCuda catches that little game.
• Is it from a country code that is known to be full of spammers?
• Is the connection originally from an IP block that is notorious for abuse? These blocks are typically all outside the United States, where US law cannot reach. Some are owned explicitly for the purpose of spamming. We simply refuse to talk to any of those (few) addresses.
• Does the mail contain HTML, executable, or "PIF" attachments?
• Does the mail contain certain words that mark it as being spam? If so, how many?

All of these criteria are looked at in context to determine what to do. The message may be refused outright (if the SMTP rules are violated), it may be bounced back to the sender, it may be passed unmolested or it may be thrown away silently. Most messages are either passed or returned.

If a message is returned in error, the sender will get a message explaining what has happened. They may easily resubmit the message to you with the headers intact - if they do, their address will be "white listed" and from that point onward email from that user will be delivered to you unmolested.

How can I use this with my Cell Phone?

Most newer cellular phones include data capability and a built-in email application (e.g. Motorola RAZR, V330, V515, V635, many Sony Ericsson models, etc.) Some cellular providers, such as T-Mobile, have low-cost data plans that permit accessing the Internet. Others charge "per-megabyte" for transfers.

For those who have email capability on their cellular phones, you can "point your phone" at your mailbox here. A special domain, "email-phone.net", has been established for this purpose (so your email box would be "userid@email-phone.net".)

Most cellular providers have their own email gateways which you can use, however, that email box is private to your phone - that is, you can't use it as a general email box. Further, many cellular providers count email sent or received through this email gateway as a "message", and thus charge you extra - even though you're already paying for the data transport.

SPAMCuda solves both problems. An email box here is accessible from anywhere. It works from your phone, your home, and your office. Our "Fuzzy POP Before SMTP" technology insures that for people on non-VPN-style cellular data service, you will be able to send email from your phone - an essential service for many users. At the same time, you receive all of the normal SPAMCuda benefits - nearly 100% spam blocking, user configuration of your spam preference lists, and full logging.

Can I forward email from a domain to SPAMCuda instead of having the MX record pointed to you?

No. The reason for this has to do with how SPAMCuda operates - it requires the sending machine's protocol information to make proper decisions about email messages.

If you forward email rather than point an MX record, then the connection comes from the forwarding machine and critical transaction information is lost. Also, any challenges issued would go back to the forwarding machine, which is not what you want to have happen - that's the wrong place, and would likely cause the challenges and rejections to be silently lost forever. In the worst case it could result in YOU spamming a victim of header forgery. For these reasons attempting to serve a domain's email in this fashion must not be done, as it will not operate properly and could result in lost email and/or your machine being implicated as a spam source!

If you wish to point a domain's email at the SPAMCuda system, you must point the domain MX records at "mail.spamcuda.net" once you have set up the account(s) from the control panel.

Note that pointing an MX (or forwarding email to Spamcuda) if you have not set up the domain for service via the control panel will cause SPAMCuda to refuse all the inbound email for that domain as an invalid destination.

Can you split a domain's email between SPAMCuda and somewhere else?

The short answer is no. The reason is that MX records in the DNS do not allow mailbox names to be associated with them, so there is no way to specify that email to "admin" should go to one place while email to "user1", both on the same domain, should go to a different machine. As such if you point a domain at SPAMCuda, then all email for that domain must be received and processed here.

Why is SPAMCuda better than the other solutions available in the market?

Several very important differences are present in SPAMCuda - and not in the other solutions being peddled to consumers and small businesses for spam control, including:

• We block more spam! Most user-loaded spam software has an effectiveness rate from 50 - 90%. SPAMCuda, in its default configuration, blocks 99% or more of all spam attempts! Spam control software that is less than 95-99% efficient is simply useless; you may as well hit "delete", since you'll be doing it anyway. Only an integrated, system and protocol-level approach such as SPAMCuda applies can approach the goal of stopping all spam from reaching you.
• SPAMCuda operates at the protocol level. Other spam-interdiction solutions you can buy look at the messages in your inbox - which is too late. SPAMCuda is able to stop the majority of spam before it ever receives it, simply by examining the transmission "in process" and determining that it is fraudulent. If your spam software is operating on your mailbox, then you are losing much of the information necessary to make the "is this spam?" decision! No product that loads on your end-user computer can act at the protocol level, and without that capability, anti-spam software is crippled at best in preventing you from being innudated with ads for "male enhancement products."
• By operating at the protocol level, SPAMCuda saves you time, storage and money, and improves your system's safety . By not storing messages for you that are spam, you avoid downloading them and bringing them into your computer. While increasing numbers of users have broadband connections, the fact remains that even if you don't care about disk strorage, transmission speed and the total amount of data you move around, every time you bring in a message to your sysetem you potentially expose your sysetm to viruses, trojan horses and worms. SPAMCuda keeps these risks away from your machine.
• By operating at the protocol level, SPAMCuda does NOT return bounces to forged FROM addresses. This is one of the major problems with "post-processing" solutions. By not operating this way, we can offer a challenge/response function that is not succeptable to being tricked into spamming someone who has had their mail address forged into the message headers.
• "User level" software requires you to maintain the database that determines what is and is not spam. This usually requires an ongoing subscription of some kind, or manual intervention. While SPAMCuda allows you to manually override the system's default list, we take care of this detail for you by performing all maintenance on the system "spam" lists, completely transparently to you, and our updates take place instantly. SPAMCuda saves you time, hassle and money.

Is there any satisfaction or money-back guarantee?

We offer something even better than a money-back guarantee - a free trial.

You may establish a control account at no charge or obligation, with no need to supply us with any billing information. When you do so, there will automatically be deposited into that account a number of "trial" credits, which will give you some time to explore SPAMCuda on your own, without cost or obligation.

If you find that SPAMCuda is not for you, then you can abandon the system without cost. You don't have to pay us a dime for this privilege. This free trial offer, however, is only available once per person and/or physical address, and persons found abusing or circumventing the free trial system will have their access to SPAMCuda permanently blocked without notice.

If you decide you do like SPAMCuda (and we're quite sure you will), you can execute a PayPal transfer at any time from the control screen to replenish your credits and keep your free account from expiring. At that point you become a paying customer of SPAMCuda.

The amount of "free credit" may vary from time to time with various promotions and may also be withdrawn without notice.

If I don't specify a domain, what is my email address?

Your email address is "username@mail.spamcuda.net". You can set up Outlook or Outlook Express to utilize this "inbox" easily by adding an "incoming" email account using your user name to log in and "mail.spamcuda.net" as the "POP3" host name.

For sending out email, you have two choices:

1. Your usual ISP's SMTP server remains where you send email out from. This is the preferred option.
2. You may use the SPAMCuda domain (e.g. mail.spamcuda.net) to send your email. Sending email through this machine requires that you first authenticate your account using a POP email reception session. Once you have executed a POP email retrieval session, and authenticated your login ID, you can send via the SPAMCuda servers for a limited time.

How many email boxes can I have?

As many as you'd like. Each is charged a setup fee in credits (currently 5 credits, or about fifty cents) when it is set up by you, and 1 credit per day to maintain. There is no charge to remove an existing email box. You may have as many - or as few - as you'd like. The only limit is that you cannot use any email name that is currently in use by someone else.

So I can have a separate account for each person in my family or office?

Absolutely. The owner of the accounts (the "control ID") has the ability to add and remove email accounts, and also to change the password on any existing account under its control, all via a web page. You do not need to contact us or wait for one of our agents to take care of this for you.

How much email can I have in my email box?

Each account is limited to 20MB (20 megabytes) of storage, although this is currently a "soft" limit and not enforced. We reserve the right to charge additional credit(s) for excessive use. We encourage you not to leave email on the server for excessive periods of time unless you have some overriding need to do so.

What if I want my control account's email address to be on SPAMCuda?

You can certainly do that.

However, be aware that if your control account should run out of funds, notifications would be lost! This is also true for Paypal notifications related to reactivating your account. You can, however, log into the control account in this instance and change the registered email address to recover from this problem.

What do I have to do to change an account once it has been set up?

Accounts cannot be changed, except for their password, once they are established. You can, however, remove an account and create a new one. You will be charged a new setup fee if you do this.

How are password and email address changes handled?

Passwords for any email account under your control account can be changed at any time, as can the password for your control account itself. Changes to the control account take place immediately; changes made to a registered email account will take a couple of hours before they are effective.

If you change the control account's notification email address, the system will lock your account until you reconfirm it; you will be sent a new confirmation request email to the address you have named, and you must follow that link to make your control account accessible again.

How quickly are accounts established?

New email accounts are normally established within about one hour. You can check on the status of your accounts at any time by signing into your control account; the status of each account under your control will be shown.

How does the system secure my data?

First, no financial data is ever stored on SPAMCuda. However, passwords to your email accounts are! As such all access must be via "HTTPS" (SSL-encrypted) sessions over the web; attempting to sign in using a "http" request will fail with an error message.

We have appointed PayPal to handle credit card and "eCheck" billing, and as such there are no personal financial records stored on the SPAMCuda system. This protects both you and us. Further, even if someone manages to steal your SPAMCuda password, they cannot authorize additional billing from your PayPal account without your separate PayPal password, which our system has no record of. Due to this integration and separation of functions, your financial information is safe from intrusion as a consequence of your use of SpamCuda. (PayPal is responsible for their own security, and their relationship with you in that regard.)

In addition, the system is designed to sign you off automatically if you remain inactive for more than 10 minutes. Your session is also invalidated if you close all of your open browser windows, irrespective of how much time has elapsed. In those cases you will have to sign in once again. This is intended to protect you in the event that you happen to wander away from the keyboard for some reason, or are using a public computer.

Does SPAMCuda's system use cookies?

Yes, but it stores no persistent cookies on your computer. All cookies used by the SPAMCuda system are session-specific and destroyed when your browser sessions are closed. SPAMCuda was designed not to have a "keep me logged in" feature to avoid the security risks associated with persistent cookies being stored on your computer.

Cookies, however, must be permitted by your browser in order for you to be able to sign in. If you completely disable cookie recognition then your SPAMCuda control account login will not function.

What if I lose my control account password?

The "Recover" button on the login page will email your credentials to your registered email address. You must supply the email address we have on file for the control account.

I lost access to that account and can't get to the recovery data!

Contact us using the "Email Us" link on the left. Include your name, address, and telephone number. We will call you to verify that you are who you say you are, and once satisfied we can change your password for you to allow you back into the system. Be aware that we will want to know specific transaction details related to your account's activity.

What if the system's behavior isn't to my liking?

That's the beauty of SPAMCuda. Everything is customizable - without you needing to know how to program! There is a web interface to the system that allows you to change the "white" and "black" list criteria at will, as well as to provide a custom message to be returned to suspected spam senders (who may be legitimate people trying to reach you.)

You have the option of using the system defaults, your own configuration, or any combination of the two - and you can change this at any time, instantly, from anywhere in the world via a SSL web session.

How effective is SPAMCuda?

No spam blocking system can be 100% effective.

But here's where SPAMCuda is different from the other solutions on the market - while most spam protection systems are at best 80% effective in stopping the spam from getting to you, SPAMCuda typically boasts effectiveness rates in excess of 95%! Indeed, in trials that have run for more than a year, during which more than 500 spams a day per email box have been encountered, SPAMCuda typically has allowed one or two messages daily to pass that it should have trapped.

That's darn good.

Lesser solutions that simply mark the messages as spam don't help you, and neither do ones that download the spam and then put it in a quarantine folder. Those chew up both your disk space and bandwidth, and worse, force you to deal with your spam manually anyway. After all, do you really need someone to stick a "SPAM" line in the message header for you to know that an email advertising "Viagra" is spam?

How do I know what SPAMCuda is doing?

SPAMCuda writes log information for every message that it blocks into your own personal log file. You can turn the log on or off, examine it at will (again, over the web), and clear it any time you'd like. If you don't clear it the log will roll over after about 2,000 spams have been recorded. For most users, this is a couple of weeks of spam - for those who get spammed heavily, its still a few days worth of traffic.

SPAMCuda doesn't hide what its doing from you - we think you should know what's being filtered and why. with SPAMCuda, you can see that information any time you'd like - from anywhere in the world.

There is mention of "challenge/response" in your description above.....

Yes, there is, and for good reason.

A spam solution without it is not a solution!

Let's examine this. The ideal spam-fighting software would trap all of the spam, trap none of your real email, never make a mistake, and leave you with only clean email in your mailbox, with the senders oblivious to the fact that you are running this software. It would also require zero effort on your part, ever, to accomplish all of this.

That's unobtainable - but it is the ideal against which spam-fighting software should be designed.

Most spam-fighting software operates in a "post processing" mode. That is, the mail system receives the mail, the spam filtering software looks at it, makes a decision on whether it is spam or not, and then either rejects it, passes it on to you as "regular" mail, or perhaps quarrentines it for you in a "brown list".

Unfortunately, all post-processing software operates at a severe - and in our opinion fatal - disadvantage - it cannot do anything with the original SMTP (email) transaction, since that's finished before it ever gets the message to look at, and it has lost all of the state information from the transaction itself.

That's unfortunate, because our statistics say that better than half of all the spam can be rejected with absolute certainty before it is even received.

However, this can only be done if you are operating at the protocol level. It is obviously impossible to reject spam before you receive it if your software doesn't even look at it until reception is complete.

What's worse, once the protocol has been closed, you can't safely return notifications to the sender of the email if you suspect it is spam. If you attempt to do this, then any spam that has a forged "From" header in the email (that would be basically all of them!) ends up spamming (by you!) the forged victim's address with your (bogus) rejection message. Many competitive systems do exactly this, and it earns them (rightly so) the hatred of other users on the Internet who are victim of their poor design decision. There is no fix for this if you post-process messages; the only possible action you can take is to not issue rejections or challenges at all! Needless to say, this leaves open the possibility that you will silently throw away perfectly good email. Losing good email without notice to the sender, so they can take corrective action, is not acceptable under any circumstances. Forcing you to examine a "brown list" of quarrentined email is likewise not acceptable - if you need to do that, you may as well "just hit delete" and not pay for, or use, any spam blocking software at all.

Many competing spam solutions include "hooks" into centralized databases known as "DNSRbls", or "Realtime blacklist" DNS servers. This is a poor implementation choice for several reasons. First and foremost, it gives spammers a central point of attack that disables or radically slows thousands of individual mail servers all at once! Second, these "RBLs" block legitimate email senders frequently - and while a listing can be "appealed", that's a manual process that must be initiated by the person on that address. With dynamic IP addressing common today, and the proliferation of "owned" (hacked) machines being used to send spam, it is unlikely that the spammer is even still USING the RBL'd address by the time someone tries to send email to you from it. Third, email blocked by a "RBL" is an absolute block - you never see it, and there is no means of override made available to a legitimate sender. And finally, RBLs are both ineffective and unnecessary to actually stop spam - in short, using them can do more harm than good.

SPAMCuda does not use DNSRBLs, yet obtains superior results to those systems that rely on this "technology" to identify spammers.

In short, SPAMCuda suffers from NONE of the above problems.

Since SPAMCuda operates at the protocol level, it is able to (and does) examine the context - and content - of an email transaction before it sends it on to be filed in your mailbox. More than half of all the spam is never examined for content, because it fails the protocol-level checks - these are tests that do not fail legitimate messages, but often fail spam - especially spam that is sent from "hijacked" machines, which have become the most insideous and difficult to interdict sources of spam traffic.

Further, SPAMCuda can and does issue "challenges" to possible spam sent to you, without the risk of collaterally and unintentionally spamming the victims of forged email "From" addresses. Since SPAMCuda does NOT generate queued email, it is impossible for SPAMCuda to generate UBE (spam) itself. However, a legitimate email sender who tries to talk to you, and who gets "caught" by your spam filter, will get a challenge and be able to override the filter - immediately, and on their own.

Finally, SPAMCuda is written entirely in "C". By not using "toolbox" systems such as "PHP", SPAMCuda entirely avoids the security risk of unknown code flaws in "public" toolboxes - flaws that all too often show up only after systems have been compromised.

How much does SPAMCuda cost?

SPAMCuda is extremely cost-effective. The system operates on a "credit" arrangement, where you purchase credits that are applied to your control account. Each email account in use costs one "credit" per day to maintain, and five credits to originally set up. You may change the email addresses that are supported at any time (subject to someone else having the same name, of course), and new accounts are typically set up within a couple of hours.

Payment may be sent in by check, money order, or PAYPal. PayPal payments which come from credit cards or PayPal balances are credited immediately through an online exchange with the PayPal system.

How do I know when you have received a PayPal payment?

We have implemented very "tight" integration with PayPal's servers, and as such receive almost instantaneous notification (automatically) when you make a payment. These events will generate an email to you from the SPAMCuda system informing you of the transaction that was posted, the amount, its status and you current number of credits (after any credit or debit that is generated.)

You may also view the PayPal transaction log associated with your account at any time from the control panel by clicking the "Transaction" button - the complete log of all your PayPal transactions will be displayed.

How much money must I deposit at a time, and will you warn me when I am running low on credits?

PayPal payments are accepted in $10.00 increments. There is no maximum, however, depositing more than one year's worth of credit for your anticipated number of email accounts is probably a waste of your money. We have no desire to hold large sums of your cash (we do earn interest on them, but we've no desire to make money off NOT providing an actual service to you!)

The system will email you a reminder when your account credit balance reaches a level where it will be exhausted in two weeks (14 days), and again when it reaches a level where it will be exhausted in seven days. It is strongly recommended that you replenish your account at the first warning, as PayPal "eCheck" payments can require up to five business days to clear, and the funds will not be available until they have cleared PayPal's system.

In the event you run drastically low on credits an instant PayPal transfer via credit card or PayPal balance is normally posted within minutes.

What if I run out of credits or abandon my account? How long will you hold my email?

Accounts which run out of credits cannot receive new email, nor can you log in to retrieve any email that is stored within them. Persons attempting to send email to an account which is out of credits will receive a "no such user" error.

If you replenish the control account your expired accounts will reactivate automatically during the next daily update run, which normally happens in the early morning hours.

14 days after your control account runs out of credits all record of your control account and subsidiary email accounts under it will be purged. A final notification will be sent to your control account's registered email address, if it is still reachable, when this occurs.

A control account which is inactive for 90 days (has no subsidiary active email accounts), with or without credits stored within it, is deleted and all credits stored at that time are lost. Final notification will be delivered at that time if the email account listed for the control ID is accessible.

Can I transfer an email ID from one control account to another?

No. Each email account is irrevocably assigned to a control account, and you cannot transfer them from one to another. You can, however, delete an email account at any time you would like. Once the deletion has been processed any other control account may re-register that same email id..

What are the specific Terms of Service?

You can access the Terms of Service (TOS) at any time from your control account by clicking the "Agreement" button, or from here, by following this link, which will open in a new window.

I need more information or help....

Use the "Email Us" link on the left of this page, and we'll get right back to you!