Mailscanner Tagging: Yes Or No?
February 4, 2007 by Michelle Waters
We recently installed Mailscanner on our servers to improve spam handling. This is done on the basis of a score that Mailscanner applies to each email, then tags the email accordingly. For instance, emails with a low score receive no tag. Emails with a medium score will receive this tag: {Spam?}. Emails with a high spam score receive this tag: {Definitely Spam?}.
So, you may be wondering how this helps you…
If you are using Outlook to download your messages, you can setup mail rules to delete spam based on the headers. However, this cannot be done in Outlook Express.
For those of you with Outlook Express, we have kept the subject line tags generated by Mailscanner, which will allow you to filter your email based on the Subject. For example, you can tell it that any email with {Definitely Spam?} should be deleted immediately (Of course, you can do this at the server level as well…)
Then you can tell Outlook Express to send any mail with {Spam?} in the subject to a specific folder, where you can look at it later to make sure nothing has been incorrectly tagged. (And if it has, you can whitelist the address in your Mailscanner settings.)
Of course, if you are using Mailscanner to delete anything with a high spam score, and are separating medium spam scoring email using Outlook or Gmail or another method, you may not want to deal with the subject tags.
So, it’s up to you: Do you want the tags, or not? Tell me what you think…
I love the new mailscanner. Right now, all of the email that is tagged definately spam goes to my general mailbox, and doesn’t get downloaded to my Outlook Express. I just go in periodically and delete all of the hundreds of junk email. It has cut back dramatically on how much junk spam I was receiving each day. I usually check my email throughout via my mobile phone while on my lunch break from my day job. It is much better now that I don’t have to wade through so much of the junk mail.
I used to get about 30-50 junk spam / day to my regular mailboxes, and now it is more like 10. I LOVE it!
Thank You Michelle!
The spam scanner seems to think I am spam. People are receiving emails from me with it marked as {?spam}. Is it scanning the outgoing mail as well? or is it their mail scanner doing that?
I sugest you whitelist your organisation if you send messages and have them marked as spam.
on my side i’ve been using mailscanner for my personal mail and at work, works great, i delete high scoring spam, and forward low spam to a spam mailbox and once every couple days i clean this up.
whenever it catches ham i use sa-learn –ham and it seams to work well.
Amy,
Sorry I didn’t get back to you. I couldn’t find this on the helpdesk or the forum — forgot that the question was on the blog. LOL
Anyway, our Mailscanner checks outgoing messages for viruses, but not for spam.
I recommend you ask your customers, whose servers are marking your emails as spam, to check with their hosting companies to find out why those emails are being incorrectly marked. That is the only way you’ll be able to get the problem taken care of.
Charles, thank you very much for your input!