LFC's state-of-the-art clustered e-mail system breaks new ground in mail processing, shared hosting e-mail features, and business SPAM and Virus protection.

Since 1996, LFC Hosting has remained a leader in bringing cutting edge technology to the door steps of small businesses by packaging it through a single affordable, automated, business-friendly system. Our innovative e-mail system is yet another way that LFC makes the latest technology accessible to small businesses, allowing you to leverage it to gain a distinct advantage online.

At the core of LFC's mail system, built on well supported, widely used and actively developed established open-source technology, lies the ultimate in speed, efficiency, fault-tolerance, reliability, redundancy, security, flexibility, expandability, and load-balancing. It also offers innovative new features including SPAM filtering, Virus protection, IMAP, auto responders, aliases, always-BCC, "Catch-all" accounts, and much more.

Our modular, multi-layer design is comprised of multiple high powered servers, with infinite room for expansion. Each server has at least one duplicate performing the exact same function to allow for:

• Load-balancing: A method where LVS Directors (routers) distribute the load across the system, sending traffic to whichever server(s) can offer the fastest response. This process is transparent to LFC's clients, but ensures continually optimal performance at all times.
• Fault-tolerance: If a server experiences a problem, the routers automatically avoid sending any traffic to it whatsoever, allowing LFC to promptly resolve the problem without any downtime.

This also means that, unlike other services, LFC is able to perform maintenance, easily add additional servers to increase performance and handle higher loads as needed, and even add new features to the system without any disruption of e-mail services.

The result of all of this is a highly efficient, fast, reliable, secure, robust, and feature-rich e-mail service for LFC's customers.

Features

Following are a few of the cutting-edge features of LFC Hosting's mail system, giving our clients the distinct advantage over their competition:

Secure Socket Layer (SSL) Email

Secure Socket Layer (SSL) encryption is familiar to most as a means of safely transferring credit card and banking information on the web. However, LFC Hosting pleased to support the same SSL encryption for email, providing enhanced security and peace-of-mind for sensitive email communications.

SSL encryption for email is optional. However, enabling it is extremely fast and straightforward and simply involves configuring your e-mail program to connect using our SSL (secure) email server hostnames.

Advanced SPAM Filtering, configurable per e-mail address or per domain

Real-time Blacklists (Helps eliminate SPAM)

State-of-the-art Virus scanning on in-coming and out-going mail, configured per domain name (yourname.com)

Can handle multiple scanning platforms (for both SPAM and Virus protection)

All SPAM and Virus scanning technologies offer advantages as well as disadvantages. Contrary to other hosting services, who rely on single SPAM and Virus scanning technologies, LFC’s e-mail system provides us with the ability to continually add more SPAM and Virus scanners as they become available, scanning all of your incoming and outgoing e-mails several times over to dramatically improve filtering rates.

Autoresponders with Rate Limits and Substitutions (customizations)

Auto Responders provide the ability to send an automatic message back to anyone who sends you an e-mail.

Substitutions, another unique feature of LFC Hosting, allows our clients, through their Control Panel, to customize their Auto Responses by having the system automatically replace certain KEYS with dynamic information. For example, the key [DATE] in the Auto Response message is automatically replaced with the current date. This is useful for providing current information in your Auto Responders, appearing as though the automatic responses were genuinely written by you.

Rate Limiting allows you to intelligently set the number of minutes that must elapse before the Auto Responder will send another response to the same person through your Control Panel. With competing hosting services, Auto Responders will send exactly one response for each message received. However, if a particular person (example: joe@schmoe.com) sends multiple messages to your e-mail account within a short period of time, you would not normally want that person (Joe) to receive multiple identical responses, making it obvious that the responses were not written by a real person who would have ignored the other messages, or responded to them differently.

Forwarding Accounts

Always-BCC Accounts

Always (Always Blind Carbon Copy) allows you to automatically send a copy of every e-mail that is received by one or more of your other e-mail accounts to another address. This is useful for managers who wish to be aware of all e-mail sent to their staff members, or project managers who wish to be aware of all collaboration among team members.

Blind refers to the fact that the original recipient is not aware that a copy was sent to the person overseeing their e-mail.

Always-BCC accounts are easily administered automatically through our state-of-the-art LFC Control Panel.

"Catch-All" Accounts

Catch-All" accounts are another unique feature of LFC Hosting that provides you with greater control over your and your company's e-mail. Through the innovative LFC Control Panel you are able to configure a "Catch-All" account that automatically receives all e-mail sent to a non-existing e-mail address. This is useful for ensuring that you receive all correspondence from customers and prospects. For example, a prospective customer may e-mail "info@yourname.com" expecting to reach someone. Your "Catch-All" account would receive this message if you do not have a real e-mail account setup called "info@yourname.com".

Soft and Hard Mailbox Quotas

Through the unique LFC Control Panel, you can actually place size limits on your mailboxes themselves (ie. total size of all messages). A Soft Quota simply notifies you when you reach the limit you specify but still allows mail to be delivered. A Hard Quota notifies you and does not allow further mail to be received. This gives you more control over how much e-mail disk space you use, and ensures that you are not billed for additional E-mail Disk Space if you do not wish to be.

Finally, competing services typically limit the size of your individual e-mail boxes on the server to a low number, such as 5 MB. Unlike virtually all other hosts, LFC Hosting is unique by not placing a separate space quota on your e-mail accounts. Rather, the disk space that your e-mail accounts occupy on our e-mails servers is limited only by the total disk space included with your account, allowing you send and receive large e-mail attachments and avoid worrying about your e-mail account exceeding its quota when you are on vacation.

Expiry Date per E-mail Account

This parameter allows our clients to specify a date after which an e-mail address is automatically disabled, and will no longer accept e-mail. This is beneficial as it allows you to setup an e-mail address temporarily.

This is yet another feature of the one-of-a-kind LFC Control Panel that gives our clients more flexibility over competing hosting services.

Ability to enable/disable individual e-mail addresses

This feature allows you to temporarily disable an e-mail address without actually deleting it, and re-enable it later on. The mail that is currently in the account when it is disabled is not erased. Rather, it is only erased when the account is deleted altogether.

Like all of the other self-service administration features of LFC's unique and innovative e-mail system, any e-mail account can be disabled and re-enabled with the click of a button through our centralized LFC Control Panel, available with all of our hosting plans.

Peace-of-Mind 28-Day E-mail Backups

LFC Hosting offers you peace-of-mind knowing that your e-mail is being continually backed up to our unique multi-terabyte hard drive backup system, with additional provisions in place to ensure that your privacy is always protected.

In the event that you accidentally delete an e-mail, or it becomes corrupted, we retain a full 14-day history of your e-mail onsite, and store an additional 14-day history offsite in the event of a fire or natural disaster.

Our backup system incorporates multiple sets of hard drives rotated on a weekly basis, and unlike many competing services, is connected to our web servers through a completely isolated Gigabit network. This means that your website stays fast as it runs on a separate network from the backup system. The Gigabit network also well exceeds the optimal speed requirements of our backup system, ensuring fast, efficient, and scalable service.

Finally, with some competing services, backups occupy the disk space included with your account, whereas with LFC, increased reliability comes standard!

IMAP Mailbox Maintenance

LFC Hosting's unique IMAP Mailbox Maintenance feature automatically clears email messages older than 30 days stored in the "Trash" folder of IMAP email accounts on a weekly basis. We offer this service at no additional cost with all of our hosting plans (starting at only $9.95/month) in the interest of saving the valuable disk space included with your account and minimizing overage charges that can occur from a build-up of mail in the "Trash" folder.

This feature can be deactivated if desired through the Email Administration area of your LFC Control Panel.

Technology

LFC has achieved the ultimate in fast and efficient high-volume mail handling, fault-tolerance, reliability, redundancy, security, and load-balancing with two key technologies working hand-in-hand:
"LVS Directors" and "MySQL Database Replication".

LVS Directors

You can think of the LVS Directors as sophisticated "traffic cops". They route and direct the flow of traffic to multiple redundant servers in a "pool", based on which servers can handle the most traffic in the fastest and most reliable manner. They also block traffic that is not allowed.

LFC operates two LVS Directors, each constantly watching the other to see which one should be active at any given moment. This means that, not only do they offer fault-tolerance and redundancy to LFC's entire network, but they are fault-tolerant and redundant themselves.

Thus, unlike competing services, LFC is able to sustain a main router failure with no downtime whatsoever. Moreover, these routers feature the latest in security protection with firewall rules, port-blocking, traffic monitoring and more.

MySQL Database Replication

LFC uses a central MySQL database server to house the "master" copy of the entire mail system database. This "master" copy is the one written to by our Control Panel. However, each individual mail server also houses its own copy of the database; the mail servers read from this copy. Using MySQL database replication, any changes made to the master database are seamlessly, automatically and instantly propagated to the individual copies or "child databases". In other words, the individual "child databases" are in sync with the "master" database at all times.

This approach allows LFC's mail system to run as normal even when the "master" database server, or any of the individual mail servers, fail, yet ensures that all changes made through our innovative Control Panel are instantaneous, making our control panel much faster than competing products, and allows the individual servers to read the e-mail account, etc. data from their own local hard drives (dramatically improving the system's overall efficiency and speed).

Traditionally, engineers must decide between:

1. Housing all data centrally, allowing all changes to be made instantly to a central database, but slowing down the system as individual servers must access the central database over the network.
2. Multiple local modular databases, allowing individual servers to quickly access data locally, but requiring the system to maintain multiple copies of the database, which can become cumbersome and usually means that updates do not happen instantly.

With MySQL Replication, LFC was able to achieve the best of both worlds, the final piece of the puzzle in achieving the ultimate in efficiency and reliability and building a mail system far exceeding industry standards.