The Hosted Email platform utilizes robust spam and virus filtering to help ensure only wanted mail arrives in your client’s inbox. Spam and phishing campaigns are becoming increasingly targeted and sophisticated, which can result in spam messages mistakenly arriving in the inbox.

In this article, we will discuss how to handle spam messages which are not correctly moved to the spam folder.

Spam Threshold

The first action that users receiving spam in their inbox should take is increasing their spam threshold. Hosted Email includes three spam settings: Normal, High, and Very High. By default, users are on the Normal setting.

This setting determines what spam score is required in order for a message to be considered spam. The High and Very High settings will place messages with a lower spam score in the spam folder.

We recommend users increase their spam threshold to High and see if this improves their missed spam issue. If it does not, then the Very High setting would be the next option to try.

To set the spam threshold:

1. Login to the webmail interface
2. Click on the Settings tab
3. Click on Spam Settings
4. Set the desired Threshold Level
5. Click Submit

Note: The spam threshold setting must be enabled on the domain’s brand before this option will appear in webmail.

If users are set to the Very High setting and still receiving spam in their inbox, then they can proceed with the next options.

Allowed / Blocked Senders

The webmail spam settings include an option to allow or block senders and sending domains. If the source of spam is coming from one particular domain, then blocking the sender is the best option for stopping this missed spam.

Mark Message as Spam

Our webmail interface includes an option to mark a message as spam. This report is fed into our spam engine and helps us to improve spam filtering. Moving a message to the spam folder in an IMAP connected client will also report the message as spam and help us improve spam filtering.

Check Filters / Other Settings

There are a few more mailbox settings to check to ensure our spam filter is allowed to work as expected.

Occasionally, messages are being correctly detected as spam, but some other account filter is moving the message back to the inbox. Check the webmail settings > filters to ensure no filters are incorrectly moving spam messages back to the inbox.

Wildcard entries are allowed in the Allowed Senders spam settings, Double check that the user has not whitelisted *@*.com as this will bypass spam filtering.

Reporting Missed Spam to Support

If all of the above actions have been taken and the mailbox user continues to receive spam in their inbox, the next step is for the missed spam messages to be reviewed by support and sent to our security team to tweak our mail filter.

Spam campaigns are becoming increasingly targeted towards specific resellers and groups of users. As such, specific tweaks to our spam filtering are sometimes required to meet the needs of your user group.

To report missed spam messages:

1. Ask the user to create a Missed Spam folder in their webmail or email client
2. Ask the client to move as many missed spam messages in the folder as possible. The more examples the client can provide, the more improvements we will be able to make to improve filtering. Ideally, the client will create the folder and gather examples for 7 days to help build a wide array of evidence.
3. Once enough examples are gathered (we recommend at least 10) send an email to support@systron.net  with the mailbox name.

Our support team will gather the messages for processing and advise once changes to the spam filter have been made. This process will continue until you are satisfied that the missed spam issue has been resolved for the user.