How You Can Fight Spam

The brazoslink mailserver utilizes a very effective combination of email scanning, spam rejection and filtering technologies that protect your inbox from viruses and most spam. In a typical week, our server stops more than 10,000 spams and several viruses. Inevitably, though, some spam gets through, because spammers are constantly updating their methods and getting sneakier. What's an innocent victim to do?

As always, a brazoslink consultant will be glad to provide training or other assistance in this area, at reasonable rates--so if the following instructions are confusing or fail to meet your needs, give us a call!

If you're like us, you hate spam, and you'd like to be able to do something about it--preferably something easy, effective, and fast. To that end, brazoslink has integrated a "smart" scanner into the mailserver system. This scanner is able to make educated evaluations of incoming emails, based on its training--and this is where you come in. You can teach the scanner about spam and non-spam (a.k.a. "ham") emails, by feeding it email from your account. Both spam and ham are important, so feed it a balanced diet! The more information you give it, the smarter it gets, and the better able to discern spam from ham. It is especially important to feed it messages that were incorrectly tagged by the server (spam that wasn't tagged as such, or ham that was tagged as spam).

Note that this process does not change/move/delete your email at all--it processes a copy--so you won't lose any information.

There are three ways to feed email to the scanner: via the webmail interface, by redirecting spam to a special email address, or using an IMAP-based email client.

Method 1: Report spam with the webmail interface. On the main webmail screen, you will notice two buttons labelled Spam and Not Spam, respectively. To teach the scanner, simply check the box to the left of the message(s) you want to report, and click either the Spam or Not Spam button, as appropriate:

If you are viewing an individual message, the Spam and Not Spam options appear as links in the Options line:

Either way, when you submit an email, you should see a status message telling you that your email has been processed:

If you inadvertently click the wrong button--reporting spam as ham, or vice versa--simply repeat the process clicking the correct button. The scanner will automatically fix the mistake.

Method 2: Redirect spam to a special email address. Most modern email clients have a redirect feature, though its location differs between applications. For example, Mail.app in Mac OS X has a Redirect menu option in the Message menu (see below). Click here to view a page of instructions on how to redirect email in most modern email clients.

Redirecting an email message in Mac OS X's Mail.app

Method 3: Report spam with an IMAP-based email client. If you use an IMAP client to access your brazoslink email, you can create two IMAP folders, named junkmail and notjunkmail (all lowercase), and place copies of emails that are spam and not spam, respectively, into those folders. Every hour on the hour, the scanner will process and delete any messages in those folders. Again, any message placed into the junkmail or notjunkmail folders will be deleted!

Filter Your Email:

Your email client probably has the ability to perform client-side filtering on incoming email, and might have its own built-in junk mail filter. Each email client is different, so the proper use of these capabilities is left as an exercise for the individual reader.

The brazoslink webmail interface allows you to create custom email filters for "server-side" filtering, i.e. the filtering is performed by the server, before your email client ever sees the messages. The brazoslink mailserver evaluates incoming messages using its various spam and virus detection systems. Virus-infected emails are automatically rejected, and the rest are assigned a spam probability score based on the results of the various tests. By default, emails with a score between 4.50 and 6.31 are flagged with an "X-Spam-Flag: YES" header (see example below), and emails with a score above 6.31 (high spam certainty) are rejected. The rejection score can be changed on a per-user basis, so if you would prefer a different rejection score applied to your account, please let us know.

To create a server-side filter that moves any message that has been flagged as spam into a folder called Junk, follow these steps after logging onto the webmail interface:

Click the Filters link in the main window:
Click the Add a New Rule button. This will bring up the New Rule Wizard. In Step 1, select the Header Match option:
In Step 2, make the condition read "The header X-Spam-Flag: is YES" as shown:
In Step 3, select the option to Move message into the existing folder Junk. Also, farther down in this screen, select the Stop option (If this rule matches, do not check any rules after it):
Verify your new rule, and click the Finished button:
Back on the main rules screen, you should see your new rule displayed. Be sure to click the Save Changes button, or you'll lose your rule!