Phishing:

This is where your receive an email from a trusted organization (like a bank, an eStore, or your hosting provider) which claims that you need to click a link to go to their site and update your personal information for their records. Following the link you come to a site that portends to belong to the company you trust, thought it doesn't. If you don't notice in time, and your hosting company doesn't either, you might accidentally give a thief and a saboteur the weapons they need to take your money and destroy your system.

Fortunately, there are many hosting providers that have, as part of their hosting packages, software that detects and intercepts these kinds of scams for you.

Viruses:

Internet criminals will also send viruses through attachments to emails. By now almost everyone's encountered computer viruses in one way or another, if not on their own system, then on someone else's. Hosting companies will now offer virus protections as part of their regular hosting packages.

Offering hosting clients firewalls is also extremely helpful. If your hosting company offers to scan attachments to make sure they're free of viruses, and if it keeps its database of known viruses current, it might be a hosting company worth sticking with.

If you have an email account, you've received spam, those insidious, unsolicited solicitations for products and services you neither want nor need. Even your hosting provider is affected by spam. And still, somehow, companies foolishly continue to churn out the spam in the hopes that one day we'll change our minds and buy their products or services. You want to find a hosting company that can help you battle this shameless beast.

Now there are spam filters many hosting companies use to siphon off suspect emails before they're delivered to your account. Maybe the sender of the email hasn't been authorized by the recipient to send them emails. Or maybe the hosting company recognizes that the email has been simultaneous sent to a ton of other recipients. Some spam filters are heuristic, meaning they learn over time to better and better distinguish mail you want to read from mail you don't. And now, hosting companies can even use software that analyzes the actual text in your emails to search for sales pitches or patterns between this email and similar ones sent out to other hosting clients.

Hosting companies that use such technology will also generally let you determine whether to have flagged emails automatically deleted or merely relocated to another mailbox that you can sift through later on to make sure there's nothing in there you need to read.

And spam is far more than a nuisance, don't be fooled. Spam can carry viruses right under your hosting providers noses.

It's a crime to mess with the U.S. mail and you should consider it no less criminal to mess with a person's email. Email is a great and powerful tool that can be sorely abused by the selfish and greedy. The hosting company you choose should be your stalwart ally in battling such affronts. Don't settle for a hosting provider that isn't up to the challenge.