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Your SmarterMail web mail system has one of the most advanced anti-spam control features on the market.

SmarterMail allows you to be as aggressive as you want when combating spam. This article is rather technical but we hope it helps you fine-tune your spam settings to minimize spam.

HOW IT WORKS
When an email comes in, several spam checks are run based on preset criteria. The checks that fail add points to the email. A final score is calculated after which the system assigns a “spam probability” to the email.

Spam checks include the following:

Bayesian Filtering
Bayesian Filtering applies statistical analysis to determine whether or not an email appears to be spam. Together with blacklists and SPF (Sender Policy Framework), this allows you to be quite sure whether or not an email is spam. Bayesian Filtering can be memory intensive so SmarterMail allows you to set the maximum resources that will be dedicated to this.

SPF (Sender Policy Framework)
SPF is a method of verifying that the sender of an email message went through the appropriate email server when sending. More and more companies are now adding SPF information to their domain DNS records and this will prevent spoofing at an increasing rate.

Pass – this indicates that the email was sent from the server specified by the SPF record (probably a good email). Set the weight to zero (for no effect) or a negative number (to reducing the spam rating).

Fail – this indicates that the email was sent from a server prohibited by the SPF record (probably a spam email). Set this to a high number such as 30 or above to add to the spam weighting.

SoftFail – this indicates that the email was sent from a server that is questionable in the SPF record. Set this to zero or a low spam weight.

Neutral – this indicates that the SPF record makes no statement for or against the server that sent the email. Usually just leave this set to zero.

None – this indicates that the domain has no published SPF record. SPF is a relatively new concept and many legitimate domains do not have SPF records. Leave this at zero for the time being.

Reverse DNS
This checks to make sure that the IP address used to send the email has a friendly name associated with it.

RBL Lists
RBL Lists (or IP4R Lists) are public lists of known spammer IP addresses. To attach to a list, click on Add List. To add a new RBL list or edit existing ones, click on the Edit RBL Lists button. Popular Spam Lists include:
 
SpamHaus  http://www.spamhaus.org
SpamCop http://www.spamcop.net

Weights
On the right side you will see default weights for thespam check. If an email has a high probability of being spam based on its content, this is the value that will be added to the message’s total spam weight.

Filtering
From the above spam checks, emails are then filtered into one of four categories (ie. zero, low, medium, high probability of spam) based on the total weight score. You can set your action so that the email automatically gets deleted or moved to a junk folder if it fits into any of these categories.

Skipping Spam Filters for Intra-domain email
You can skip spam checking for your internal company emails by checking this option.

Conclusion
I am currently using the default settings in SmarterMail together with the standard Windows Mail (junk filter set to Low) found in Windows Vista. I typically receive 150+ spam messages without filters but after going through the Smarter Mail and Windows Mail filters end up with around 10-20 spam emails per day.

Author: Larry Lam