Premium Spam Filtering Tips and Tricks

The following page contains some tips and tricks for using Premium Spam Filtering, as well as, a few commonly asked questions.

Still receiving Spam after configuring your user for Premium Spam Filtering?

Here are a few things to check for:

• Email Aliases
  If you have an email alias setup for your user, you will need to log into the Premium Spam Filtering Message Center and add the email alias under the Settings.
• Threshold Strength
  By default, the thresholds for the Premium Spam Filtering is set to Lenient. This is done to lower the chances of false positives. Through the Premium Spam Filtering Message Center you can adjust the threshold to be more aggressive. Instructions for this can be found here.
• Catch-alls
  If your email address is setup as a catch-all, the caught messages will not be filtered and will end up in your Inbox. In this case, we recommend either removing the catch-all or reconfiguring the catch-all to point to a different address.
• Point your MX record to Premium Spam Filtering
  When Premium Spam Filtering is added to your mail account, your MX record needs to be pointed to the Spam filtering servers, otherwise your messages will not be filtered. If you are hosting DNS yourself, you can find the MX information here. If your DNS is hosted through HostMySite, this is done for you.
• Removal of old MX records
  Spammers will attempt to send Spam to all existing MX records. When your domain is configured for Premium Spam Filtering, we keep your old MX record active for 24 hours to allow the change to the Spam filtering servers to take place. If you are managing DNS yourself, you will need to remove the old MX record.

Common Questions:

Question:

I used to get 100 Spam messages a day, but since I got Premium Spam Filtering, I get 5 messages in my Inbox, but only 10 in the quarantine summary. What happened to the other 85 Spam emails?

Answer:

Premium Spam Filtering has a feature called Blatant Spam Blocking (BSB). BSB will analyze messages you receive and automatically delete anything it deems to be Spam. BSB has been reported as being highly effective and has an extremely low rate of false positives. This feature is enabled by default and set to bounce messages back to the sender with the following message: "571 -- message refused". This allows the sender of legitimate messages to know the message was refused and give them the opportunity to contact you.

Instructions for updating your BSB settings within HostMySite's Control Panel can be found here.

Question:

Which filters are applied first, Premium Spam Filtering or SmarterMail?

Answer:

The Premium Spam Filters are applied first. Learn more about the Spam filtering process.

Question:

Can I setup my own filters for Premium Spam Filtering based on content?

Answer:

Premium Spam Filtering's method of Spam filtering is based on Spam signature. By using signature based Spam filtering, you avoid getting false positives as you would with content filtering. You can setup approved and denied senders and domains in the event that you want to make sure that any email from a specific domain or sender always gets through.

Question:

What should I do with Spam messages that are missed by Premium Spam Filtering?

Answer:

The first thing to do is check the header content to ensure the message went through Premium Spam Filtering. Within the header, they should see a line similar to the following:

Received: from exprod7mx50.postini.com [64.18.2.100] by mail32.safesecureweb.com with SMTP;

If this line appears, it means the message was sent to Premium Spam Filtering and the filter did not pick it up.