Spam Filtering -- How It Works

Spam

Are you getting flooded with e-mail you didn't ask for and don't want?

If you are wondering what steps you may be able to take on your own to decrease the volume of junk mail you receive, there are several things you should avoid doing. Since DONet has *never* sold our customer e-mail address list to anyone, the most likely way someone has gotten your e-mail address is by you unknowingly providing it to someone who *has* resold your address. Every time you supply your e-mail address on an online form you increase the chance of your e-mail address ending up on a list that is resold many times to bulk e-mailers. However, you may find that you are often required to supply an e-mail address in order to download software or access a particular web site. In these situations, we recommend that you guard your @donet.com e-mail address and only release it to people you intend to have e-mail communication with, and register for web sites and software using a free Hotmail or Yahoo e-mail account that you rarely check and won't mind an increase in junk e-mail. In addition, we recommend against ever following the instructions included in many junk mails to be removed from future mailings. Our experience with such removal services has generally resulted in an INCREASE in junk mail rather than a reduction.

We at DONet recognize that spam has been a growing problem for our customers for some time, and we are taking steps to prevent an overflow of junk mail in their inboxes.

New spam filtering service! On January 17, 2002, we released a new filtering system specifically for the purpose of identifying and tagging spam. The system uses a sophisticated filtering package call "Spam Assassin" that recognizes over 1000 commonly used spam patterns. If a sufficient number of patterns are matched in an e-mail it is marked as spam, and a flag is set in the message header to indicate the spam classification. Once an e-mail has been tagged our customers can then use an additional tool (visit https://customer.donet.com/tools/mailfilter.php?action=spamForm) to block the spam before it ever arrives in their in-boxes. This filtering system is a significant improvement over our previous spam filtering system. In our laboratory tests it was over 90% effective!

You control whether or not spam gets delivered to your in-box. If you enable spam filtering, then only those messages marked with an X-Spam-Status: Yes header will be blocked. You also have the option on providing a list of e-mail addresses that you wish to exclude from spam blocking, even if the message gets flagged as a spam message. This way our customers can continue to receive e-mail from mailing lists, vendors, etc., and filter out anything else that looks and smells like spam.

Until you are comfortable with our spam and e-mail blocking filters DONet recommends that you enable the "Collection" option to deliver e-mail to a special folder rather than immediately discarding it. Collected e-mails can be reviewed using DOMail, our web-based e-mail client. After using the filters for a period of time you can disable the collection feature so that spams are immediately tossed into the bit bucket. Alternatively, you can disable automatic spam filtering for your account on the E-Mail Management Control Panel and create a rule in your e-mail client to look for the X-Spam-Status: Yes header and deal with offending e-mail messages however you see fit (delete them, move them to a special folder, etc.).

Spam filtering is automatically enabled for all customers receiving e-mail at an @donet.come-mail address. However, spam filtering is now available for all of our customers, even those with their own domain names, for the small fee of $1/mo/mailbox. Call 937-226-6896 extension 20 and ask for more

Please submit your comments and suggestions regarding this feature to tools@donet.com.