Introduction to Email
To be able to receive email you obviously need an email account; but you also need a username and password and also somewhere to pick your email up from. In most cases you pick your email up from a POP3 Server, a specific computer that is responsible for collecting your email. In most cases this will be provided by your ISP (Internet Service Provider - i.e. the company that you use to connect to the Internet). Their computer acts like a post office sorting box as it collects and files all the emails that it is responsible for. It receives email from all over the Internet and files it into the different email boxes, one of which will be for you. Your email sits on this POP3 server until you connect to the Internet and ask it for your email. It will only give you your email if you give the correct username and password. All the settings you use (username, password, POP3 name) for collecting your email has to be entered into Outlook (or other email client).

Current Spam solutions
There are very many ways that 'spammers' get your email address, unfortunately the POP3 server cannot tell which email is real and which one is a 'SPAM' so it collects them all for you. When you collect your email you get everything. In some cases the ISP has some expensive software that tries to view the contents of the email and based on some keywords may delete emails it thinks are 'SPAM'. You have no control of this and you rely 100% on the ISP to be right. If you live in Middlesex, there is a risk that you could lose a lot of email as your address has the word 'sex' in it. If you applied for pantomime tickets for Dick Whittington, you may not get the confirmation as it has the word 'Dick' is used, and most spam-filters or packages would delete an email, with the word 'Dick' in it.
You can also buy 'spam-stopping' software that looks at every email you receive and based on a keyword you have setup, can delete the email. You will have to set up each word that you want to block, such as 'viagra', but then the spammers spell viagra in different ways, like 'v1agra' or 'vaigra' or 'v ia gra', for which you have to setup a keyword for each variation. Using these keywords to block emails is known as using rules or 'filters'. Fortress Mail is far superior to this as it stops 'SPAM' at source and therefore never uses 'filters'.

How does Fortress Mail work
It is very simple; we collect all your email from your POP3 server and then check each email address of the sender against your online address book. If an email is sent by a name you have not listed in your address book, the email is returned to the senders for them to validate themselves. As 'spamming' is done by computers they can't validate themselves, so 'SPAM' email will be dropped and not put into your mailbox. If the email is returned to a real user, that then validates themselves, you have an option to read the email and add them automatically to your address book, so they don't have to validate themselves again; or if you don't want the email you can drop it and if you want automatically add the user to your blacklist. In a nutshell when you ask us for your email through Fortress Mail our server only gives you the emails you want or emails that have been validated. This gives you total control of which emails you receive, dropping all the SPAM before it even reaches your mailbox.

Other benefits
So that you don't have to enter every email address by hand into your online address book, Fortress Mail has a very useful function which allows you to export you Outlook address book and import it directly into your Fortress Mail online address book. This gives you an added advantage that if you lose your hard drive or you Outlook address book on your computer, there is a version online you have available to you.