Chances are extremely high that like most users, you’ve received lots of unsolicited emails offering great deals on (probably fake) pharmaceutical drugs, stock “tips” (hawking worthless investments), and pleas from Nigerian bankers offering to “share their riches”. Called “spam”, these annoyances now make up more than 90% of all email, and it’s an ongoing fight to block them. SWCP's server-side spam filters, accessible from our homepage at http://www.swcp.com, can be a big help.

What are the spam filters?

Our server-side spam filters are a set of rules and programs which we run on our mail servers in order to remove unsolicited email, or spam. They are written in part by volunteers around the world who, like you, are tired of getting junk emails.

How do they work?

The main server filter available to SWCP customers, called SpamAssassin, scans every email you receive and assigns each a positive or negative score based on certain known features of spam and legitimate messages which the program has learned to discern. However, it is impossible to recognize all spam messages. The common features SpamAssassin uses to determine a message's likelihood of being spam are many and varied but publicly available. Unfortunately, smart spammers can learn to avoid them.

How much do they cost? How do you use them?

The use of our spam filters is completely free for every SWCP customer.  We know that an email account full of spam is hard to use, so we provide this service at no extra charge. They are easy to set up. All you need to do is visit our home page at http://www.swcp.com and click 'Anti-spam filter' on the left side. After logging in with your email username and password, you will be presented with the necessary options. The most important option is on top, and is labeled 'Filtering'. This option toggles the entire spam filtering process on and off, so you will want to make sure it is on.

The next option is almost as important. It is called 'The SpamAssassin’, and controls the settings for the SpamAssassin filters discussed last month. This filter can be set on a scale from 1-10. The lowest score is a 10, which only discards obvious spam. On the other hand, 1 is a high score which will very aggressively discard almost all of your spam, but also has a good chance of discarding your legitimate messages as junk. It is for this reason that setting your filters at level 1 is not recommended.

Which setting you choose depends on your needs, but 7 is a very good starting point. From there, you can see if your spam load decreases enough and if you are missing any 'good' emails. Feel free to try turning it down to a lower setting if you need to. There are other filters which are very helpful in individualizing your email's spam-handling, but they are part of the 'Advanced mode'. We'll discuss some of those settings next. 

Advanced Mode filters and their usage

The first new filter available in Advanced Mode is the 'To: Address Filter'. This filter allows all email which is addressed to you through to your mailbox. This used to be very helpful in stopping spam, which was usually addressed to other people, then copied to individuals in the 'BCC' field. Unfortunately, along with the 'Blacklist' option, which blocks individual addresses from your mailbox, this filter has lost its usefulness over the years due to innovations in spammer technology. Therefore, the use of these filters is not recommended.

The 'From Exceptions' filter allows you to ensure that email from a specific sender or mailing list will reach your inbox, despite other factors which would result in the messages being discarded as spam. Your other filters will also evaluate these messages by default, but this can be overridden by checking the box 'Always deliver to my inbox'. The 'Subject Exceptions' filter works the same way, except that it checks for a given word in the Subject field of your email. This is useful for mailing lists that always have a specific word in the Subject line.

The last filter is called 'Filter then Forward', and simply enables you to forward your SWCP mail to another email address. The filters' name is intended to remind you that your email will go through the rest of your spam filters before being forwarded. If you wish to have the emails saved in your SWCP mailbox as well, you should click 'Yes' where it asks 'Save a local copy?'. Do not put your SWCP address in here or you will get a duplicate.

As with all spam filters, we must warn you that caution is advised in their use. Due to the inexact nature of spam filtering, sometimes a legitimate email is discarded as spam. Never fear, SWCP has prepared for this eventuality. Rather than simply deleting any email marked as spam, we instead move them to another folder on the server called 'spamfile'. You canaccess this folder by using one of our webmail interfaces.

It would be an excellent idea to check your 'spamfile' for legitimate messages every few days, especially if you are awaiting an important email which should have reached you already. You can easily move these emails out of the spamfile back to your Inbox, but you don't need to worry about clearing out the spamfile. We automatically delete any messages older than 30 days.

As you can see, we have a lot of different options in place for you to manage your email and prevent your mailbox from being overrun by spam messages. Our technical support staff are ready and able to help if there are any question on the use of these filters, but the documentation on the page may be able to help as well. We hope these filters help make your email experience a better one.

Please note that these filters are currently available for SWCP and Thuntek customers only; NMIA users do not have access to them yet — but they will soon!