How to activate and train the account-level spam filter

All Abiliba hosted email accounts have support for account-level spam filtering. This is a final level of filtering that keeps spam out of your INBOX.

Account level filtering isn't turned on by default. The reason it isn't turned on is because you must actively train the filter to distinguish your good email from the spam. Training the filter is quite easy, simply requiring you to move the spam to a special folder in your email account.

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 MailAdmin).
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, how you subscribe 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 and look near the bottom of the page for the list of subscribed/unsubscribed folders.)

How to train the filter

Your email account now has 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 any spam that arrives 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 or your spam filter will quickly be trained that the spam is good email!

Eventually, the filter will begin automatically moving spam to the Filtered/Spam folder. (It takes about 50 or 60 spams 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 will move the message to Trash.

Every two or three days, you should 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 your INBOX!). After a few minutes, the system will retrain that message as "good" and 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 be able to recognize spam from good email.