SPAM

How can I reduce the amount of SPAM I receive?

SPAM is the bane of civilized man. We understand, from personal experience, how annoying it is and we say with all sincerity, "we feel your pain." And we're very sorry for the trouble it causes you. We do have SPAM filters on our mail servers but spammers always come up with new ways to get around filters and no filter is perfect. There is no one "solution" that works, if there was everyone would do it, and then spammers would find a way around it. For now, there are only ways to slow down the tide.

Our mail server uses Spam Assassin as the filtering software which identifies, scores, and marks messages as spam. This is an industry standard open-source SPAM software which runs on Apache servers the world over. Spam Assassin is setup to evaluate and score all emails according to the likelihood that they are SPAM, based on numerous common characteristics. When these scores add up, a message may be given a score of 1-10. The higher the number the more likely that the message is SPAM. Spam Assassin is optional on all mailboxes and has to be setup manually, something we do when we setup each mailbox. Each mailbox can determine it's own Spam Assassin settings, and can even be "trained" with a Bayesian Filter, as well as maintain a whitelist and blacklist of known spammers. This training takes active involvement from the user, however, and is usually not utilized for this reason.

We currently have the setting for the server to mark all messages that receive a score of 4.5 or higher as spam. The server appends a value to the subject line similar to "***SPAM*** _SCORE_" (where _SCORE_ is replaced by the SPAM score of the email). If we increase the score setting, more spam will slip through the filter. If it is lowered, more legitimate emails will be marked as SPAM. There is no perfect score, but we have found this to be a relatively vigorous score, which ignores most real emails.

HELPFUL SUGGESTIONS
1. Increase Spam Filter Power
Ask us to decrease the "score" a message must receive in order to be classified as spam. This will cause more emails to be marked as spam, which means some "legit" emails will also get marked as spam and moved to your spam folder.

2. Personal Rules
Implement your own rules in your mail program to move certain emails to your spam folder.

We suggest performing several filters on all mail that is NOT from someone in your address book. (Messages from your Address book contacts will be ignored)

• Move messages with ****SPAM**** in the subject to your spam folder.
• Move messages with common drug or sex related words (you pick the words you see most) to your spam folder.
• Move messages with links in them, e.g. the letters "http://" or "www", to your spam folder.
• Move messages with attachments to your spam folder.

3. Use Address Book as "White List"
Keep your address book updated with all your regular contacts. This is your "white list" and prevents your contacts' emails from being marked as spam.

4. Check your Junk Folder
Then you will want to check your junk mailbox once a day to find the one or two legitimate emails that were classified as junk mail inappropriately. And you will want to add their address to your Address book so they don't get marked as spam in the future.

Strategy Summary
This strategy has greatly helped many people with their spam problem. But it still requires personal involvement through checking for miscategorized messages. But we're dealing with computers and no program is as intelligent as you. Even a human secretary filtering your email won't get it right 100% of the time. For now this is the best we can do.

ADDITIONAL OPTIONS

Third Party Filters
Other mail services (whose entire business is "email") like gmail, yahoo, hotmail, have highly advanced spam filters and teams of engineers constantly updating their SPAM filters to respond to new known spam methods. There is no way we can compete with their manpower at this point. You may want to consider redirecting your mail through their service. We can redirect your email address @yourdomain.com to your email account with them (create a gmail account if you don't have one), and then let them do the filtering on their end. Then if you use a mail program, like Microsoft Outlook or Apple Mail, you can setup another account on your mail program to receive mail from their service through POP or IMAP and it will come directly into your mail program on your computer, so you can manage the mail locally, just like normal. In your mail preferences for this account set the outgoing mail server to use mail.yourdomain.com (with your username and password for your mail account on our server). That way you can send outgoing messages through your branded email @yourdomain.com. This way all your messages are sent from your official email address (not gmail.com). We can't guarantee that their filters will get all the SPAM either, or that they are any better, but they may catch some that ours don't.