Connect.ie - Anti Spam Services

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Spam Services

In order to identify unsolicited commercial mail (spam) Connect.ie uses SpamAssassin. Connect.ie E-mail accounts are now supported with this tool to try to recognise unwanted E-mail ('Spam') and label them as such.

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

Secondly, the tool could sometimes misidentify E-mail as 'spam' which is not.

Therefore, if Connect.ie just simply blocked these messages you could lose valuable E-mails.

Connect.ie.ie recommends setting up 'Spam' filters in your E-mail program. Filters (sometimes also called 'Filter Rules' or 'Mail Filters') allow your E-mail 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 E-mail program (if your E-mail program is not listed please send an E-Mail 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, 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.

How to Use Pegasus Mail E-mail Filters

Overview

With the advent of so-called spam - unsolicited email - your inbox can be almost unmanageable. You could find yourself deleting a lot of messages you would like to read, just so that you can keep up with the volume. This is a good reason why you should use email filtering.

Why Filter Mail?

Any good email program will offer a variety of filters to use.

I will be using Pegasus Mail 4.21c as our example because that's what we use here, but the general procedure should be roughly the same for most email programs.

What is a Filter?

A filter is a rule or set of rules that examines your email and performs a specific action based upon what it finds in each email message.

An action can range from deleting a message to moving it to a folder or highlighting it in a specific colour.

Some programs will even let you respond to the filtered email by sending a pre-made message or sending a file.
These would be advanced topics are not available in all mail programs, and so not covered here.
Let us focus on methods to sort mail, making it easier to manage.

Your First Filter

Probably the most useful filter you can have is one that separates junk mail or spam, from the rest of your email.

As with all filters, you must determine what makes a particular email different from all the rest, and then setup a rule to look for that part of the email.

I will set up a rule that identifies the SPAM identified email and move this to a folder away from my New Mail.
I can then check this mail separately and see that this meets my needs..

Here's where you will find the tools to start making an email filter.

Tools - Edit new mail filtering rules - Rules applied when folder is opened.

Your first decision is when to invoke the filter.

I want this filter to be applied before I start to read my mail -
I want to attend to the email that is potentially SPAM first -
so you want to filter your new mail immediately when opening the new mail folder.

Here is the New Mail Filtering Rules Screen.

This is where you define your filter. As you can see there are no rules defined as yet, so click on "Add Rule" to set it up.

This will bring up a screen which allows you to choose the main attribute of the filter.
Click the Headers button.

You will now see this screen

When you select by clicking the Headers button, the following screen will appear.

Click on Subject, put in ***SPAM*** ( as this is the way your suspect messages will appear.
Select Move from the drop down list
and CLick on the set button.

This will bring up your folder list.
Double click on the folder to which you want the mail to be moved.
If an appropriate folder doesn't exist, click the "New" button as you normally would to create a new folder, then double click the newly made folder to select it.

In this case I created a new folder called "SPAM".

You will be asked to confirm to save the changes to the mail rules, Click OK.

You might be ask why move mail instead of deleting it?

Well the simple answer is you should now have all the mail that has been checked by us and identified as spam in the SPAM folder.
You can now check this and see if any genuine mail intended for you has been marked as SPAM.

Also, as we mark all spams with a score, an asterisk for each level, you can set up an additional rule to delete all SPAM makred mail above a certain level by putting in the appropriate number of asterisks e.g.,****** , and instruct these to be deleted. I would suggest starting with a reasonably high score, say 15, which you can then reduce after a period of checking that no genuine mails are being intercepted.

Remember, let us know if you find any mail marked incorrectly. Also, please let us know if this is working well for you.

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