Spam filtering

Abiliba’s email server removes most of the spam before it has a chance to arrive in your Inbox. By stringently applying Internet standards, a significant number of spam messages, virus threats, and other malware is rejected by our servers.

All Abiliba hosted email accounts have support for another layer of spam defense: account-level IMAP spam filtering. This final level of filtering keeps the last bit of spam out of your Inbox.

For the filter to work, you must actively train the filter to distinguish good email (“ham”) from spam. Training the filter is easy, but you must do the training. And you must keep training the filter as spammers change what they send.

Account-level filtering isn’t turned on by default. If it were turned on and left untrained — or if you fail to train it — the system wrong decisions about messages to deliver to you.

Requirements

1. Your email account must be hosted by Abiliba.
2. Your email admin must turn on the account-level spam filter for your account (using Mail administration).
3. You must use IMAP or Webmail.

4. You may need to subscribe to the set of Filtered folders from within your email program. If you see the Filtered folders in the list of folders, you don't need to do anything.

   Otherwise, subscribing to a folder varies by email program. (Try looking at “Settings” or any menu item for “folders.” For Abiliba’s default Webmail, click the “Folders” link; look near the bottom of the page for the list of subscribed/unsubscribed folders.)

How to train the filter

Assuming the requirements are met, your email account will now have a Filtered/Spam folder and a Filtered/NotSpam folder. (There may also be a Filtered/Virus folder. This is left over from an earlier virus filtering technology that we no longer use. You should never see any messages in that folder.)

Move spam messages that arrive in your account’s Inbox to the Filtered/Spam folder. Moving spam to the Filtered/Spam folder is important — that’s how you train the filter. Do not delete spam that’s in your Inbox! If you delete these spam messages, the filtering system will not be trained to identify this type of message as spam. Worse, it will learn that these messages are good email and it will treat further spam messages as okay. Think of it as teaching a toddler what is okay to put in his mouth; if you don’t provide supervision he won’t learn the right rules.

Similarly, be careful about the messages you choose to identify as spam. For example, if you subscribed to an email newsletter you no longer want to receive, unsubscribe — don’t report it as spam! Doing so will cause the filter to mysteriously begin marking good messages as spam.

Eventually, the filter will begin to automatically move spam to the Filtered/Spam folder. It takes about 50 or 60 spam messages before the filter learns enough to catch most of the spam that comes into your Inbox. After a message is in Filtered/Spam for three days, the system moves the message to Trash.

Every two or three days, check the Filtered/Spam folder to make sure that it hasn't marked a good email as spam. If you find a good email in the Filtered/Spam folder, move it to the Filtered/NotSpam folder — not to your Inbox! (Unless you explicitly tell the filter to recognize this type of message as okay, the filter won’t learn and it won’t improve.) After a few minutes, the system will re-train that message as “good” and automatically move it to your Inbox.

That’s all there is to training the filter.

Remember: You must must be anal about moving spam to the Filtered/Spam folder. Do not delete the spam! Otherwise the filter will learn that the spam is good email and eventually the filter won’t recognize spam from good email.