Reporting Spam to the Filter for Automatic Learning
If spam is getting through the filter to your inbox, or if messages are scoring unusually high or getting trapped in your spam quarantine, you can do your part to help teach the system what is spam and what is not. Spammers are constantly revising their techniques at the same time that we are making changes to our filtering technology. It's unfortunately an arms race, but we do have a filter that can learn from its own mistakes.
There are two ways to teach the spam filter, one is through the Customer WebMail, and the other is to 'redirect' (NOT forward) messages to the system, from an e-mail client program that supports redirection.
Teaching the filter using WebMail
All users can use the Customer WebMail to teach the spam filter. Note that messages must still be in your server-side inbox to use this method. Log into your mailbox, check the box next to each message you wish to flag as spam or not-spam, and then click on the appropriate button.
Spam: This will tell the filter that the message you selected should be treated as spam. This is fed to the spam database for learning.
Not Spam: Use this on messages caught by the filter that you've released to your inbox (or if they have been tagged and delivered, depending on your filter preferences). This is fed to the spam database to tell it that future messages like it should not be treated as spam. You may also wish to add the sender to your whitelist.
Teaching the filter by redirecting the message
Some e-mail client software offer a 'Redirect' feature, that allow you to redirect messages to another address as if they came from the original sender. This is NOT the same as forwarding a message using a 'forward' feature.
Some e-mail programs that are known to support redirection include:
- Mail for Mac OS X
- Eudora
- Microsoft Entourage
Note: Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express DO NOT support redirection.
To report spam: Redirect the message to spam@filter.portalmedia.com.
To report non-spam: Redirect the message to not-spam@filter.portalmedia.com.
These redirection e-mail addresses only work for PortalMedia customers, originating from within our system, using us as the outgoing mail (SMTP) server. Attempting to send messages to the above addresses from any system outside of PortalMedia will not work, and the message will bounce.
Note that the bayesian learning database is only one criterion used to determine whether or not a message is spam. If your filtering level is set to a more tolerant setting, a single hit on the learning database alone may not score the message high enough to flag it as spam. If this is the case, you may wish to set your filter threshold to High, so that messages that score positively using only the learning database will be flagged as spam.
