Faq
General
- What's with the name? What does it mean?
- Hermes was the messenger of the gods to the humans (among MANY other things) in ancient Greece. If you want to know more about Hermes, you can look up its entry on the Wikipedia: Wikipedia page on hermes
- Who is behind hermes?
- hermes was developed by ITEISA for our own use. It was designed in the 2006 summer, and implemented in under a week, although development has been fast and furious since then.
- Why can't I train hermes to get more spam?
- That's because hermes is NOT that kind of antispam solution. hermes can't be trained as it depends on small tricks to reject spam. In fact, hermes never EVER stores or manages in any way the contents of your emails.
- Won't spammers adapt to greylisting and keep spamming us?
- In a future, they may adapt, but if they do, they will have to reduce the amount of spam they send drastically. Keep in my mind that hermes works by enforcing strictly the SMTP standard (called RFC) and spammers are always looking for ways of breaking the standard to speed up spam delivery.
- How effective is greylisting?
- If you have a normal level of spam (around 60 daily spam messages), greylisting will reduce it to 0 or 1 spam messages in the best of cases. If you have huge amounts of spam (around 1000+ daily) you can expect to reduce it to around 10-20 messages daily.
- Who is this ITEISA you keep talking about?
- ITEISA is the company I work for. We are a small but innovative startup from Cantabria, Spain, working mainly in the fields of web development, linux development and XHTML/CSS/LAMP development.
Technical
- Does hermes replace my normal SMTP server (sendmail, exim, postfix, qmail, etc.)?
- NO. hermes will work with your mail server, but it WON'T replace it. You can proceed to the documentation to know how to configure your mail server to work with hermes.
- Why does hermes disable the PIPELINING extension?
- PIPELINING has to be disabled because throttling is actually the opposite of it. While PIPELINING strives to make connections faster by sending commands in groups, throttling slows down the connection by inserting a delay on each response from the server.
Do you have any question not covered here? Please ask it either on the mailing list or by mail to juanjo@gutierrezdequevedo.com