How our SPAM filtering works.
Our hosting service provides a spam filtering facility on all client mailboxes.
We use an industry standard combination of Spam filtering software to apply a "Spam Score" to every incoming email message. This score ranges from 0 to 100 + with the higher the score, the more likely the message is spam.
We can then set a spam score limit to each individual mailbox to determine at what score the message will be deleted.
The standard setting is 8, which means that any message with a score of 8 or more will be deleted and not delivered to your mailbox.
If required, we can set the setting lower or higher as required.
Keep in mind that our server DELETES and spam rather than BOUNCING it back. If we increase the spam filter value too high, eg say to 5, we run that risk that some legitimate mail may get detected and the sender would not know that the message was not delivered.
We recommend that as well as our server spam filtering, each client should also use a local spam filtering solution to provide the best results.
Ideally, our server can delete all the spam with a score of 8 or higher and then your local spam filtering software can look at the remaining emails [0 - 7] and move any suspect mail to a spam folder [rather than delete it] where you can quickly scan through every few days to ensure nothing important is lost.
There are many good free or low cost local spam filtering solutions such as . .
www.mailwasher.net
www.spamfighter.com
www.spamihilator.com
Help to decide the best cut off score
Sometimes it's difficult to establish the best score for your mailbox, so for a short period of time [say 3 to 5 days] we can switch off the spam DELETE function on your mailbox. Any mail that would have been deleted is then still delivered to your mailbox, but the spam score of that message is added to the message subject line . .eg
Subject = Important Message **** SPAM SCORE 9 ****
During the trial period you can check to see if any mail from your usual contacts is being marked with a spam score . . and if so we can then adjust you spam setting to make sure they are not caught.
Why is legitimate mail sometimes marked as spam
Whilst we do not want to give an exact outline of how the spam filtering software works . . because we don't want to make it any easier for the spammers . . needless to say, this software sometime has a very hard job in trying to work out good from bad.
Spammers tend to use certain phrases and words, or type everything in CAPITALS. The software applies a small score for each spam-like item found to come up with a total score. So if your mother has accidentally typed her email to you all in capitals and mentions the best bargains she's found, then that email might get enough score to push it over the limit.