Spam Control
Within WebMail there is a number of Spam Control options available.
 
1. Friends - automatically stores email from unknown senders in your 'pending' folder awaiting a reply to a confirmation message. This helps check they are a real person and not just a spam program.
2. Spam Filtering - automatically stores email that is suspected to be spam in your 'held' folder for 2 weeks. You can go to your 'held' folder to release messages wrongly identified as spam.
3. SPF filtering - This blocks most spam by rejecting emails where the sending machine is not the mail server for the domain used in the from address
We recommend users control spam by setting
1. Friends - On
2. SPF filtering - on or Spam Filtering - on
Flow Description
 
1. Friends. Messages from people on your friends list are identified and passed directly to inbox skipping the remaining spam filtering steps.
2. SPF (Sender Permitted From) determines whether the connecting machine is allowed to send email for the domain in the 'from' address. If the domain has not yet set up SPF records a best guess is made to see if the machine is reasonable. In the case of a rejected email, the response back to the sender informs them that the domain has not yet set up SPF records. It also includes how to register the domain in the 'from' address to allow their emails to be received.
3. Accept Rules. The allow exception rules are then processed, these are used to bypass normal spam and friends filtering. Users should be careful setting up such exceptions. A exception might allow anything with my secret password in the subject, or from my boss email address.
4. Filters. Next the users filtering and exceptions rules are processed to check for special rules like, move incoming mail to particular folders.
5. Spam Rules. Next the step is the "adaptive spam detection system". This is used to determine the spam score of the email. The users spam rules are then be applied to determine if the email is to be marked as spam, placed in the held folder, bounced back to sender or deleted.
6. Friends. The friends challenge response system is then applied. This will place messages which match the friends setting, in the pending folder while a request for confirmation is sent back to the sender. Friends confirmations can be used for all unknown senders, just for suspicious looking emails or no-one. Recommended setting: is require confirmation for any email with spam rating of 1 or more. Responses to confirmation requests are handled in step 3 and will release messages from the pending folder into the inbox.