Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What exactly is Spam Gate?

A: Spam Gate is a new product launched by Digital Kiwi. It is a state-of-the-art spam filtering device that is guaranteed to prevent 99% of unsolicited commercial email or spam from reaching your email client. How it works is quite simple - it acts as a front gate to your business, blocking unwanted emails (spam, viruses and Trojans, etc) before they even enter your company's mail server.

Q: How is this different from what's already available.

A: Currently there are a lot of spam filter software products available. Spam Gate is different because it is not software that needs to be installed on a server or users PCs, and doesn't need to be updated or upgraded with new releases. Spam Gate is an appliance, or hardware device (a physical box about the size of an Xbox console or large paperback book that sits beside your server). There are other appliances available, but most of them are geared at large corporates - they are more expensive and don't all offer the customised support that Spam Gate offers because it is targeted at the SME market. Spam Gate is different, also, because it is currently stopping 99% of spam in the sites where it is already in use. Of the products in the marketplace, very few, if any, provide the affordability, reliability and local customer service that Spam Gate offers.

Q: Will Spam Gate work with Exchange Server?

A: Yes.  Spam Gate will work with pretty much any email server, but it is particularly good with Exchange Server or Small Business Server.  It is certainly much more effective than Exchange Server's Intelligent Message Filter (IMF). 

Q: Are there any prerequisites?

A: Yes.  Spam Gate requires you to have your own in house email server (it works particularly well with Microsoft Exchange) and your own email domain. 

Q: Will I have to make any changes to my other infrastructure?

A: Yes.  You'll need to make one change to your email server and one to your router or firewall.  You'll also need to add some additional port forwarding to your router.  These changes usually take about 5 minutes to make.

Q: What happens if it breaks? Who fixes it?

A: There is not a lot that can actually break with Spam Gate, but if something should go wrong, the team at Digital Kiwi will provide support and service. If your unit is leased from us, we will simply send you a pre configured replacement.

Q: How does it work?

A: Spam Gate is progressively intelligent, meaning its accuracy improves over time. Because it is based on a Bayesian learning system, it adjusts over time comparing spam to genuine emails. So as spammers get more clever, so too does Spam Gate as it recognises patterns in both the dodgy formats and content as well as the genuine, allowable communications. Because Spam Gate learns as it goes, it almost never generates a false positive (a genuine email wrongly identified as spam). Spam Gate also uses a whole raft of other tests to distinguish spam from genuine emails.

Q: What does it cost?

A: Spam Gate is available to lease or buy.

A Spam Gate device can be rented from Digital Kiwi for just $59.95 plus GST per month (plus a one-off $195 set up fee). For a company with 30 employees, that works out to $2 per user per month, and there is no contract or minimum lease period. You can return the device to us at any time.

The monthly fee includes telephone and remote access support.  We also guarantee our prices - we will never increase your monthly fee.

Spam Gate can also be purchased outright for $2995.00 ex GST. With this option we offer an optional installation and configuration service for $295.00.

Q: Are there any guarantees?

A: Yes - we're so confident in its capability that we'll let you try Spam Gate for free.
That's right - we'll install a Spam Gate device on your network and let you try it for a month. If you decide not to keep it, we'll come and take it out and not charge you a cent. If you decide you do want to keep it - and we're confident that you will - we'll invoice you the installation fee and the purchase price of the unit (or its first month rental depending on which you prefer) at that time.

Q: Who made Spam Gate?

A: That's actually quite a tricky question to answer.  Spam Gate is an amalgamation of a number of different hardware and open source software products, written by people from all over the world.  What Digital Kiwi has done, is to take these different products and combine them into a single, easy to install and use, low maintenance device that really works.  So in some sense of the word, Digital Kiwi 'made' Spam Gate, but it would be disingenuous of us to take the credit for developing all the underlying technologies ourselves.

Q: Sure, spam is a nuisance, but do we really need to pay for something else to deal with it?

A: You may not realise just how much spam is costing your business every year. Expenses add up when you look at lost productivity, crashed computers or servers, time spent dealing with your IT support team, wasted IT resources and storage space on your network and desktops, the threat of identity theft, rising ISP costs, and charges added to your mobile phone bills. For more information, have a read of "The True Cost of Spam".

Q: Just out of curiosity, why do we use the terms spam, virus and trojan?

A: The term spam came to be used to refer to the large scale or repetitive delivery of something unwanted after a Monty Python skit  about the tinned luncheon meat. You'd have to see it to understand the humour, but basically it involves a group of Vikings singing over and over again about spam in a cafe.

The term trojan is used because it refers to unauthorised access to someone's computer by way of something hidden in a program or email that a user unwittingly activates.
A virus is a computer program that can inflict damage and can spread from one computer to another by way of infected files.