YCOE's spam filtering system works by scanning incoming email for spam before it gets delivered to your email inbox. When the system finds email that matches verifiable spam message patterns, it sends the email to our filtering host. Each YCOE email account has the ability to login to our Spam filter to review any spam in the event it has been marked as spam, but is actually email that you would like forwarded to your inbox.
You can automatically move spam from our Spam filter to your inbox by using the web based Spam Filtering Tool. This tool assists you in reviewing spam and identifying email you want allowed to your inbox.
*if you have not used our Spam filter and need to have your account setup, contact your supervisor and have them initiate a Helpticket. We will contact you and walk you through the steps to get you into the Filter Tool.*
Once logged in using your account/password information, you will be taken to the Spam Review page. Here you can do the following:
- Review all email sent to you and marked as Spam.
- Allow email marked as Spam to be forwarded to your Email Inbox.
- Mark email as "not Junk", which will allow future email from that sender to be sent to your Email Inbox.
Spammers are continually changing their techniques to get their spam past systems such as ours. Our vendor updates our spam definitions continuously in order to keep the tagging as effective and as accurate as possible. Occasionally, as spammers develop new techniques, you may see a temporary increase in untagged spam getting through to your email inbox. You will have an icon on your Outlook toolbar that will allow you to report that email as junk/spam to our vendor, who will check the email and update our filter to catch these new flavors of spam. Junk icon instructions.
As the spam filter analyzes messages, it calculates a score based on established pre-configured rules. The rules are applied to a message and a score is assigned based on the number of rules that match the message. A Blacklist and various other lists are also checked by our spam filter. These are sites that keep track of spam and the various places spam comes from. A score is applied as well if a email message comes from one of these lists. The message's final score is the total of the scores from each rule checked against.
After the score is calculated, it is held against an exponential function that converts it into a percentage. That percentage is compared to spam level settings configure on our Filter. Based upon that comparison, the email will be classified as "not spam" and "spam" (55% probability).
If you have problems about these anti-spam procedures, have your supervisor send in a Helpticket.