Anti-Spam - Services

In order to identify unsolicited commercial mail (spam) Connect.ie uses "SpamAssassin technology" as well as a number of other packages. Connect.ie email accounts are now supported with these tools to try to recognise, delete or mark potential unwanted email ('Spam') and label them as such.

In most cases Connect.ie cannot stop senders of these emails from doing so - they keep changing their email addresses and the mail servers or computers that they (ab)use.

Secondly, the tool could sometimes misidentify email as 'spam' which is not.

Therefore, if Connect.ie just simply blocked these messages you could lose valuable emails.

Connect.ie.ie recommends setting up 'Spam' filters in your email program. Filters (sometimes also called 'Filter Rules' or 'Mail Filters') allow your email program to automatically detect messages that were marked as 'Spam' and move them to your trash box. This also gives you a chance to look at them and check whether any of them were misidentified.

Follow the links below for instructions on how to set up a 'Spam' filter in your email program (if your email program is not listed please send an email to support and we will add instructions for it as soon as possible).

Unfortunately Outlook Express 6 does not support filtering based on special header fields.

All suspected spam is marked to assist your filtering processes.

If you are interested in how the 'spam'tool works follow this link to the SpamAssassin homepage

Connect.ie's anti-spam tool is powered by "SpamAssassin technology", an OpenSource program.

Connect.ie checks new incoming mail on our mail services and runs a large number of tests on headers and content of mail. While running specific tests, the program assigns marks to the mail (the spam level). After running these tests, the program adds several extra headers to each mail. Subsequently a mail program (Outlook, Pegasus Mail, Netscape Mail) can see by these headers whether a mail was identified as potential spam or not.

Shortly a special mark "***SPAM***" will put into the subject header of the mail when a mail message reaches spam level 5 or higher.

The flags added in the header offer the possibility to separate spam mail from regular mail.

For this purpose you create a filter in your mail client./ program

In mail programs such as Outlook - ( Not Express Version) and Pegasus Mail you can create filters using all information mentioned above.

A disadvantage of these programs is that the filters only work when you open your inbox.

It is useful not to have deleted the mail identified as spam at once.

It may occur that regular mail is identified as spam.
This especially occurs when mail is distributed via a distribution list.
By having moved all mail identified as spam to a separate folder you can check this folder and delete the spam.
After some time, when you are sure that no real mail is labelled as spam, you can adjust the filters and have the spam deleted immediately.