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Spam has been a growing problem since the inception of the
Internet.
DfwOnline.net now has an anti-spam engine in place. This
tool uses *Bayesian Statistical Filters, and **Real-time Blackhole Lists (RBL)
to identify spam from real (wanted) email messages. While this technology is not
perfect, it is amazing how well it detects spam while keeping "false positives"
to a minimum.
Users that wish to take advantage of spam filtering may email our support
department using the contact form and make that
request. In the email include your name, address, and your username
(logon) and we put the filter on your account. You will be sent a confirmation
email after the filter is put in place. Please allow 48 - 72 hours for
processing.
AFTER THE FILTER IS PUT IN PLACE FOR YOUR ACCOUNT
Email messages that test positive as spam are sent to the user's email box, then directed to a sub-mailbox named "Spam" instead of the "Inbox" or main
mailbox. This mailbox can be accessed via webmail at:
http://mail.dfwonline.net
Just login with your normal user name and password and you will see the folder
or sub-mailbox "Spam." If you don't have a "Spam" folder then you have received
no spam messages. This box is only created if and when a spam message is
received by our servers addressed to you.
You can then review the messages in that box and delete or move them to the box
of your choice. Messages in sub-mailboxes are not downloaded when using a mail
client such as Outlook Express. Only messages in the "Inbox" get downloaded.
Because many users will not monitor their "Spam" email boxes, these email boxes
will become quite large over time. Therefore, the system will periodically
purge these boxes.
For this reason do not leave any message in the "Spam" mailbox that you want to
save. After a message is purged there is no way to recover it.
HOW TO MOVE MESSAGES FROM THE SPAM BOX TO THE INBOX IN WEBMAIL:
When you have the "Spam" mailbox open in webmail you
can "mark" and move any messages you want to download to the "Inbox."
The next time you check your mail with Outlook Express the messages will
download as they normally would.
DELETING THE SPAM FOLDER:
After reviewing the messages in the "Spam" mailbox and determining that there is
nothing you want, the entire mailbox (folder) can be deleted. The "Spam"
box will automatically
be recreated the next time a spam message is received that
is addressed to you. To delete, select "Folders" up at the top left and a dialog
box will open. Working in the bottom section "Modify a Folder," select "spam"
in
the column on the right and then click the "delete" button.
HOW TO REMOVE SPAM FILTERING FROM YOU EMAIL ACCOUNT
If at some point you would rather that your email worked just as it did prior to the spam
filters being put in place. Send a message to our support department using the
contact form and we remove
this service from your account. When emailing please be sure to include
your user name. For security reasons this message must be generated from your
DfwOnline.net user account.
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More details about the anti-spam filtering technology
*Bayesian
spam filters calculate the probability of a
message being spam based on its contents. Unlike simple content-based
filters, Bayesian spam filtering learns from spam and from good mail,
resulting in a very robust, adapting and efficient anti-spam approach, that,
best of all, returns hardly any false positives.
Bayesian Spam Filters Tweak Themselves, Getting Better and Better
Bayesian spam filters are a kind of scoring
content-based filter. This approach does away with the problems of simple
scoring spam filters, and it does so radically. Since the weakness of
scoring filters is in the manually built list of characteristics and their
scores.
Instead, Bayesian spam filters build the
list themselves. Ideally, you start with a (big) bunch of emails that you
have classified as spam, and another bunch of good mail. The filters look at
both, and analyze the legitimate mail as well as the spam to calculate the
probability of various characteristics appearing in spam, and in good mail.
The characteristics a Bayesian spam filter
can look at can be the words in the body of the message, of course, and its
headers (senders and message paths, for example!), but also other aspects
such as HTML code (like colors), or even word pairs and phrases. Making it
extremely effective in detecting spam.
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**Real-time Blackhole Lists (RBL) are third
party services that include domain names and IP addresses of known spammers.
These list are queried by mail servers to perform real-time lookups to determine
if the source domain or IP address of an incoming email message has been
reported as transmitting spam. These lists are not static but change every few
minutes. Spammers regularly change their IP addresses to further their
cause so this up to the minute information is very important and makes these
list very effective combating spam.
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Need a detailed definition of "what spam is"?
http://www.monkeys.com/spam-defined/definition.shtml
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