What you need to know about the spam filtering system:

• Any email that scores highly enough will be marked as spam and will be delivered to the ‘spam’ folder. Depending on your email program, this may automatically link the spam folder to the ‘Junk’ folder in which case you may not see the spam folder, if it doesn’t link to the Junk folder, it may show the folder name as spam. 

• No spam filter is perfect, so some unwanted emails may still get through and some genuine emails may also be marked as spam. When a genuine email is marked as spam this is referred to as a false positive. For this reason, it is important that you keep an eye on your spam folder. If you are expecting an email that hasn’t arrived – the spam folder should be the first place to check.

• If you were expecting an email that hasn’t arrived and it isn’t in your spam folder - the next place to check is ‘MailScanner’ in cPanel. After clicking 'MailScanner' in cPanel, click ‘MailControl’ – this will show you all of your email and how it has been categorised. If the email is showing here and was marked as spam, you can release the email to your inbox and you can also whitelist it to prevent future issues. It is unlikely you’ll need to do this, if at all, however the option is there if its ever needed.

• You can fully disable the spam and virus scanning features if desired, using the 'MailScanner' page in cPanel mentioned above, however we strongly advise against doing this - contact us before considering this as we will likely be able to adjust the spam filter settings on your account to suit your usage better.

• Messages in your spam folder older than 30 days will be deleted automatically. This is to help prevent spam from wasting your storage space and to keep your spam folder a manageable size.

• If you use Outlook and can't see the span folder, in Outlook go to the send/receive tab, go to send/receive groups, define send/receive groups, select the relevant account and press edit, choose the 'custom behaviour defined below' option and then tick the relevant folders, including the 'spam' folder which you generally need to scroll down to see. Then press OK to save the changes, you should now see the spam folder.

• The system uses 4 categories for emails received – Clean, Low Spam, High Spam and Infected. We’ll explain these below:

- Clean – this has scored below the spam score threshold, so the email is likely genuine, however some spam messages may still be marked as clean. It is normal to receive newsletter type emails from reputable companies as these are not deemed as spam. If you receive newsletters or similar that you don’t wish to receive, use the unsubscribe link in the email.

- Low Spam has scored low, so is likely spam, however some genuine emails can be scored as spam. Emails that score as Low Spam will be delivered to your spam folder, which you should check regularly for any false positives.  If you find any false positives, you can whitelist specific email addresses or domains to stop them from being delivered to the spam folder in the future. Note that this should only be done if a false positive occurs, as white listed email addresses/domains will bypass the spam and virus scanning process which could allow a virus to be delivered to your inbox.

- High spam has scored so highly that the chances of it being a genuine email are virtually nil – we’ve yet to see a genuine email score this highly, so these messages are deleted immediately so don’t even make it into your spam folder. Emails in this category usually include scam and phishing emails.

- Infected means that the email contains an attachment or link to a virus/malware and will be deleted so won’t appear in your spam folder. Occasionally, a genuine attachment can be marked as infected, but this is rare. The only example we’ve seen of this so far, is an email containing a backup of a website, which included files which were scored as high risk as they contained executable files. 

If you find yourself having to white list a lot of email addresses, or generally find the spam filtering is causing you inconvenience, please contact us so that we can review and adjust the settings to better suit your needs better. 

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