Spam Filter Information

The USA2net Spam-Filter, powered by Apache's SpamAssassin, is a state-of-the-art system designed to help you limit the amount of junk mail (spam) received in your Inbox. It accomplishes this by evaluating every email message you receive and weighing it against a series of tests. A certain weight value is assessed for each test that is passed. After all tests are complete, a final weight value is totaled and assigned to that message. If that total is less than the level you have set as acceptable in your spam filter settings, then that message is received normally. If the total weighted value of the email received is higher than the level you have set as acceptable, then it is marked as Junk and you never receive that message - it is automatically put into a Junk folder viewable from within USA2net Webmail. For more information about how SpamAssassin works, please click here to visit the SpamAssassin Team's website.

USA2net Spam-Filter signup is not automatic - customers must login to the spam filter configuration page and change their settings in order for the filter to take effect. Customers who do not sign in and configure the spam filter are not effected by it - all messages, spam included, will continue to be allowed through as normal. Click here to login to your control panel to configure your spam filter settings.

Filter Sensitivity

The primary setting on the spam filter is the Filter Sensitivity under Preferences. Initially, you are set to a setting of 15.0 - this means that any messages with a final weight of 15.0 or higher will be marked as spam; any message with a weight below 15.0 will be allowed into your Inbox. See the illustration below:

USA2net suggests a filter setting of 4 to start with. If you are still receiving spam messages, you can tighten your spam filter settings - select a number lower than your current setting, then click the Apply button. To loosen your spam filter settings, select a number higher than your current setting - this will allow more messages to get through.

Custom Filter Rules

You can create your own custom filter rules that supercede other spam filter settings automatically. For instance, if you want to ensure that you always receive mail from a particular person, you can create a rule to make that happen. Similarly, you can also create a rule to always reject messages from a particular person. Click the arrow on the drop-down box under Add Rule:

To always accept mail from user@domain.com, select Accept Mail From in the drop-down box, type user@domain.com in the next box and click the Add Rule button. You should now see your newly-created rule under the Current Rules heading.

You can also create rules to always accept/reject mail from entire domains - just enter *@domain.com to accept/reject mail from every user of domain.com. Do you have a friend who you never want to be filtered, but can't remember their full email address? This isn't a problem! Just enter the first part of their email address in the email box - if your friend's email address starts with myfriend@xxxxxx.xxx, you can enter just 'myfriend' in the email box to accept any message from any email address which has 'myfriend' in the username portion of the email address.

Remember to always click the Apply button to save your changes, then click the Logout button to exit the spam filter.

Think you're ready to configure your spam filter settings? Login and try it out!

Troubleshooting

Question: How can I view messages that have been filtered out by the spam filter?

Answer: Login to your email account via USA2net's Webmail, then in the upper-right hand corner, you should see a drop-down box next to Open Folder. Upon opening your drop-down box, you can see the folders junk and almost-certainly-spam - select one of these folders to open it and view its contents.

The "junk" folder contains messages scoring less than 15.0 - it is here that you will find messages that may have been filtered by mistake (adjust your configuration settings to correct this). The "almost-certainly-spam" folder contains messages that score at 15.0 and higher - in nearly all cases, these are spam messages and should just be deleted or ignored.

Question: Can I opt-out of the spam filter?

Answer: Yes! The USA2net Spam-Filter is not automatic - users must login to the configuration page and effect changes. Users who opt not to do this will continue to receive all messages sent to them, spam included.

Question: Can I submit spam messages to you to add into your spam filter?

Answer: No, with USA2net's Spam-Filter, powered by SpamAssassin, this is not necessary. In addition to working with other spam-tracking teams like SORBS, the SpamAssassin Team is constantly updating their own spam databases, tweaking the tests used to evaluate email messages, etc. As SpamAssassin does not accept spam submitted to them, USA2net will not accept spam to be submitted to us - we will simply delete it as there is nothing further we can do.

Question: I've already installed a spam-filter on my computer. Will signing up for your spam filter interfere with the one I already have installed?

Answer: It shouldn't, however USA2net does not recommend that you sign up for our spam filter if you have already installed one on your computer system. Most spam filters you install to your computer evaluate messages as they are downloaded. With USA2net's Spam-Filter, messages are evaluated on our mail server long before they are ever downloaded to your computer - your spam filter would just re-evaluate messages which our filter has already cleared as being non-spam.

Question: I've signed up for your spam filter and I'm still receiving spam messages! How can I get rid of these?

Answer: First, understand that no filtering system will be perfect. At some point, spam will get through any filter that is installed, and it will find its way into your inbox. This does not, however, mean that you cannot further tweak your configuration settings to try and eliminate even more spam. Try setting the Filter Sensitivity one notch lower, or if the spam you're receiving is from a specific user or domain, try setting up a custom rule to reject mail from that user or domain.

Question: Sometimes I get mail from my friend, and sometimes that same friend's messages are filtered into the junk folder as spam - how can I correct this?

Answer: Create a custom rule to always accept email from your friend's email address. In fact, it's probably a good idea to add a custom rule for the email addresses of any of your family or friends whom you never want to miss a message.

Question: A message was filtered as spam that shouldn't have been. Is there any way to get this message back to its original form and keep emails from the sender from being marked as spam again?

Answer: If you open the message within Webmail, you will see the tests that it passed and it's resulting weight. You'll also see a link labeled 'Original message before SpamAssassin' - if you click on this link, you should be able to view the original message, but bear in mind that HTML-based messages will not be displayed as they were meant to. To keep further messages from this sender from being marked as spam, create a custom rule to always accept mail from this sender.