Configuring Spam Filters

Configure Email SPAM Filters for:

Email Administration Console Outlook 2002 Outlook Express 6 Outlook 2003

Spam, also known as junk email or unsolicited commercial email (UCE), is flooding the Internet with many copies of the same message in an attempt to force the message on people who would not otherwise choose to receive it. Most spam is commercial advertising, often for dubious products, get-rich-quick schemes, financial solicitations, or quasi-legal services. It may also be offensive in nature. Email spam lists are often created by scanning Usenet postings, stealing Internet mailing lists, or searching web pages for email addresses. In addition to this, the internet has recently seen a massive growth in email-based viruses.

 

To combat this problem myhosting.com has recently updated its SPAM and virus protection protection software for all our servers. Our SPAM solution effectively filters spam by using a wide range of advanced rule sets and statistical analysis to 'score' each message that our mail server receives and records this score in the header of the email message. The higher the score, the more likely the email is spam.

 

Customers are provided with several options regarding how to handle SPAM messages:

• Add #SPAM# to the subject line of any message suspected to be SPAM and apply rules on how to handle the message.
  
• Add !@#$ to the subject line as a meaningless marker for any message suspected to be SPAM and apply rules
  on how to handle messages marked this way.
  
• Don't modify the subject line, I will set rules based on the email header ratings.
  
• Create a sub-folder called SPAM and move all messages suspected to be SPAM to this folder.
  
  NOTE: Email in this folder will be automatically deleted after 7 days based on the time of delivery.
  

 

Our spam filter does require a few quick steps to enable. For information outlining how you can utilize our improved 'tagging' system to create rules to send spam messages to a specific sub-mailbox or folder (our recommendation), or to forward, delete or bounce these messages, please follow the instructions provided in the column to the right.

 

To check the contents of your SPAM folder you have a few options. You can connect to your account using a compatible email IMAP4 client. For instructions on how to connect to your email account using IMAP4, click here.

 

For instructions regarding how to connect using POP3, click here.

 

All myhosting.com customers* will benefit from these new measures as our system now provides highly-accurate, spam filtering with very few false positives. Our system will scan all email coming into your domain. If a virus is detected in an attachment, the attachment will be removed. A notification email is then sent to the recipient notifying them of the action. Customers do not need to configure anything to enable this virus protection.

 

Important: While our spam filtering software does a very good job guessing whether any incoming message is truly spam or not, remember that a very good guess is still a guess. Our system will probably classify a small fraction of non-spam messages as spam (false positives), which will be delivered to the Spam folder. Conversely, it will probably fail to correctly detect a fraction of spam messages (false negatives), which will wind up in your Inbox. You are responsible for reviewing your Spam folder and determining if any messages in there are not spam.

 

* This applies to all myhosting.com plans with the exception of those using our Domain Parking service.