Greylisting is a method used to reduce the delivery of junk/spam emails whilst allowing legitimate emails to be delivered.

Greylisting looks at the IP and email address of the sender and the recipient address. If our system does not recognize this information then it will temporarily reject the email. All legitimate email systems will attempt to resend the message at a later time, and the e-mail will be accepted and delivered.

Most applications that send junk/spam email only send messages once and do not attempt to resend them. As these systems do not retry the emails will never be accepted by our system and therefore not be delivered to the mailbox in question.

Greylisting does not delete legitimate email messages, it simply rejects the first attempt to be delivered. All legitimate emails will be successfully delivered using greylisting as long as the sending mail server attempts to resend the message between 4 minutes and 6 hours after the initial attempt. The potential effect greylisting may have is a slight delay in the delivery of legitimate emails. Once the first email has been accepted from that sender all subsequest emails should arrive without delay.

Greylisting is turned "ON" by default for all email mailboxes and forwarders. You can easily disable greylisting for individual mailboxes via the Webmail interface at https://mail.controldns.co.uk. The option to disable Greylisting is available under 'Account Settings' in the 'Settings' menu.

If you would like to disable Greylisting on the entire domain name, and therefore for all email addresses, this can be done via the hosting control panel. Simple follow these steps:-

    Log into your hosting control panel
    Select 'Domains'
    Click on the relevant domain in the list
    Select 'Email Accounts'
    Tick the 'Disable Greylisting' checkbox and click 'Save'

If you wish to keep Greylisting enabled you can avoid any delays for important email by adding the senders email addresses or domains to your 'Trusted Senders' list. Again this is available in the Webmail interface, within the 'Settings' menu. Any messages sent from email addresses or domains listed in the 'Trusted Senders' list for a mailbox will bypass the Greylisting feature and be immediately delivered.