If you have adopted a rule to move messages to a specified folder, we recommend that you check this folder often to be certain that legitimate messages have not been caught by your rule. You should periodically remove unwanted messages.
If you find that not all spam is being filtered, you might want to adjust your rule(s). Before proceeding, you should examine the header information of the messages that made it past your spam filtering rules. (Remember: incoming email messages larger than 100KB are not scanned or assigned spam scores/levels. Messages that receive a score of less than 1 (one) will not have spam score headers added.)
Look at the X-Spam-Score or X-Spam-Level of these messages. As a general rule, a spam score greater than 7.0 indicates that the message is indeed SPAM.
In Webmail:
Depending on the scores that you observe, you may wish to set up more than one filtering rule. For example, if you are confident that messages with scores greater than 7 are spam, but some spam is still arriving at your inbox, you might want to make two rules:
The second rule would move messages with an X-Spam-Level between 4 and 7 to a folder where you could preview the contents before removing them.
The order of the rules is important. You must FIRST handle the messages greater than seven (don’t forget to add the stop processing rules). Then you will handle messages greater than four (this should capture only those messages receiving a score between 4 and 7).
In Outlook/Exchange these two rules would appear as:
Apply this rule after the message arrives
with X-Spam-Level: **** in the message header
move it to the Checkit folder
and stop processing more rules
In Webmail, these two rules would look like:
All messages considered as SPAM (unsolicited commercial messages), and with score greater than 4, will be stored in the INBOX.Checkit folder. Then STOP processing rules.
You should adjust these levels to reflect what you find when you examine spam level scores.
If you find that messages that are not really spam are being caught by your second rule, you may want to apply “exception” filtering rules. Exception rules prevent email messages from being filtered out if they meet the criteria stated within the “exception”. You may decide to allow messages from a certain email address or with a certain subject-field to be delivered to your INBOX (or moved to another previously created special folder) regardless of the spam score. A combination of “regular” spam rules and special “exception” rules allows you to use a lower spam score to eliminate more “junk” email while ensuring that you do not delete messages you deem important.
In Outlook/Exchange, the exception is contained within the rule, so the above rules might look like:
Apply this rule after the message arrives
with X-Spam-Level: **** in the message header
move it to the Checkit folder
except if from Mom
and stop processing more rules
In Webmail, you need to make a rule that runs BEFORE the spam rule to handle your exceptions. For the above example, this would look like:
All messages considered as SPAM (unsolicited commercial messages), and with score greater than 7, will be discarded. Then STOP processing rules.
All messages considered as SPAM (unsolicited commercial messages), and with score greater than 4, will be stored in the INBOX.Checkit folder. Then STOP processing rules.
The order of the rules is very important. Please note that the “exception” rules must be run prior to the rule specifying the spam score range. This will ensure that email meeting your exception(s) is not discarded or moved to a “spam/junk mail” folder prior to delivery.
Experimentation, time and patience are the keys to creating and maintaining filtering rules that will best serve your needs. Please refer to the other documents provided by ITS at http://www.albany.edu/its/app_glance_spam_filtering.htm for more assistance with your spam filtering needs.