Inside MailChannels: A Day in the Life of the Spam Fighters

Email should just work. And when it does, most people don’t think about the machinery behind it. But for web hosting providers, that simple “send” button is anything but simple. A single compromised account can damage IP reputation, flood support queues, or worse—land your entire customer base on a blocklist.

That’s why behind the clean delivery of every outbound message, there’s a relentless effort happening in the background—led by MailChannels’ Operations team. This elite crew works 24/7 to safeguard email from spam, phishing, and abuse. We sat down with two key members of the team— Sridhar Kakkillaya, VP of Operations, and Rick Moss, Infrastructure Operations Engineer—to get a firsthand look at the pressure, complexity, and precision required to keep bad email out and good email flowing.

The Threats Keep Changing

Each morning begins with analysis: examining traffic trends, spike alerts, and anything suspicious. The team must stay one step ahead of a constantly evolving adversary.

Gone are the days when spam poured out of obvious IP ranges or reused message formats. Today’s attackers operate across massive botnets and rotate IP addresses, sender names, subject lines, languages, and headers with dizzying frequency. Even seasoned filters can struggle to keep up.

Spammers also exploit what the team refers to as “zero-day phishing,” where they register brand-new domains, use them for a few thousand emails, and then abandon them before reputation systems catch on.

“We’re seeing phishing campaigns that change everything—domain, headers, content—so quickly, our systems don’t have enough time to learn before they’re gone,” says Sridhar.

This constant motion means the team isn’t just blocking spam—they’re forecasting the next tactic before it becomes widespread.

Automation Does the Heavy Lifting—But Humans Close the Gaps

MailChannels is built on powerful automation. A sophisticated backend tracks sending behavior, monitors for anomalies, and classifies messages in real-time. It’s the first line of defense against abuse.

But when spammers test the limits and find ways to blend in, automation alone isn’t enough. The team supplements machine learning with deep, manual analysis—especially when dealing with novel or subtle threats.

Rick plays a hands-on role here, diving into logs, comparing message patterns, and sometimes instinctively identifying spam campaigns before systems flag them.

“Automation catches a lot—but clever spammers are always looking for the blind spots,” he explains. “That’s where human eyes still make the difference.”

This human-machine collaboration creates a layered, adaptive defense: one in which algorithms handle the scale and operators bring the nuance.

Balancing Security and Deliverability

Blocking spam is only half the equation. The other half—often more difficult—is avoiding false positives. A false positive might mean a customer’s invoice, password reset, or booking confirmation gets flagged as spam, leading to confusion and churn.

The Operations team walks a tightrope daily, fine-tuning filters to catch the worst actors without penalizing legitimate senders. It requires both technical precision and an intimate understanding of how attackers craft emails to appear authentic.

“Phishing emails are designed to look exactly like legitimate business messages,” says Rick. “Same branding, same format—sometimes the only difference is one random-looking link.”

The team monitors these edge cases closely, adjusting heuristics and training systems to learn not only what spam looks like but also what legitimate traffic looks like.

When the Unexpected Hits: Responding to Fire Drills

Every so often, something breaks—fast. A misfired filter rule, a compromised plugin, or a sudden change in sender behavior can trigger a cascade of delivery issues, which is when the Operations team goes into overdrive.

Recently, a malformed regular expression unintentionally blocked a large amount of mail. Thanks to real-time monitoring, the issue was flagged and reversed almost immediately. But the team didn’t stop there. They investigated, wrote a post-mortem, and implemented new safeguards to prevent similar issues from being deployed again.

“Mistakes happen—what matters is how quickly we detect and fix them,” says Sridhar. “We’ve built systems that not only alert us fast but also give us the tools to roll back and recover with minimal impact.”

It’s a reminder that reliability isn’t just about technology—it’s about resilience and preparation.

Delivering Trust, Not Just Email

In the web hosting world, email isn’t just a service—it’s a business-critical feature. When something goes wrong, providers don’t just face technical challenges. They deal with customer complaints, support overload, and reputational damage.

That’s why MailChannels invests so heavily in its Operations team. These email experts are more than engineers—they’re guardians of deliverability, defenders of reputation, and stewards of trust.

So the next time a message lands cleanly in the inbox, just know: that someone at MailChannels helped make that happen.

Want to know how MailChannels can secure your outbound email?

Contact us and discover how we protect email at scale for the world’s web hosting providers.