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PN's Spam detector too strong

sinewave
Grafter
Posts: 305
Thanks: 1
Registered: ‎17-08-2007

PN's Spam detector too strong

I am getting too many genuine emails marked by plusnet's spam filters as spam. These include emails to an email forum I subscribe to (which "captures" some emails but not all - yet they all come from a central forum "system" - if you know what I mean), as well as just friends and colleagues, using standard UK based ISP's etc.
Its so bad for me that I have to forward the spams from the webmail spam folder to my machine to manually check at home. It makes the PN spam checker completely pointless to me.
I didn't even know PN had set this spam thing up until I was casually looking at webmail "just to see" one day. I don't usually use webmail.
I understand the global issues regarding email right now, but I can't help feeling PN is failing to improve things. I find I have to not only work harder to battle against the global issues but I have to keep checking its not plusnet thats messing things up.
Not good IMO
10 REPLIES 10
kreynolds
Grafter
Posts: 433
Registered: ‎05-04-2007

Re: PN's Spam detector too strong

I think that the current level is now just about right.
Very little spam gets through - 2 in the past 3 weeks, and what does is picked up by AVG.
I get the odd rare false positive through Plus Net, and when I do I forward the headers to notspam@despamchecker.plus.com.
You can always turn off the spam filter via
Member Centre===>Email Settings===>Manage My Mail====>Spam
TheFlyingGribbl
Grafter
Posts: 68
Registered: ‎31-07-2007

Re: PN's Spam detector too strong

I too have had a few emails recently marked as [SPAM], from several addresses that had previously been sent ok.  For example, I send an email from my office address to my home address, containing a useful link.  This was tagged as [SPAM]
Is there any way we can add a 'white list' of addresses? 
orbrey
Plusnet Alumni (retired)
Plusnet Alumni (retired)
Posts: 10,540
Registered: ‎18-07-2007

Re: PN's Spam detector too strong

You can forward incorrectly identified SPAM to:
notspam@despamchecker.plus.com
sinewave
Grafter
Posts: 305
Thanks: 1
Registered: ‎17-08-2007

Re: PN's Spam detector too strong

Quote from: orbrey
You can forward incorrectly identified SPAM to:
notspam@despamchecker.plus.com

...and what exactly does this do? Does it just help to "train" the spam detector or does it literally, wholly prevent submitted addreses from being quarantined?
Is there an address to send undetected spam?
I totally understand a perfect anti spam system has yet to be invented but, for me, the current PN system is far too clunky and un-reliable to use in practise.
Any spam system, that can result in loss of genuine emails is useless to me. I cannot afford that risk. I have switched it off.
Denzil
Grafter
Posts: 1,733
Registered: ‎31-07-2007

Re: PN's Spam detector too strong

It helps to train the software. If you see undetected spam you can forward it to spam@despamchecker.plus.com
Any genuine emails that are marked as spam are not lost. They are stored in a separate spam folder that you can access via webmail. You need to subscribe to the INBOX.spam folder from the webmail settings. Any that are incorrectly marked can be moved to your inbox and forwarded to notspam@...
Or, as you have done, you can turn it off if you want to use your own anti-spam, but you will then get all the spam delivered to your PC.
bobboulby
Grafter
Posts: 1,139
Thanks: 4
Registered: ‎20-07-2007

Re: PN's Spam detector too strong

Quote from: kreynolds
I think that the current level is now just about right.

I agree - it's just about spot on for me at the moment.
Bob
bobpullen
Community Gaffer
Community Gaffer
Posts: 16,869
Thanks: 4,950
Fixes: 315
Registered: ‎04-04-2007

Re: PN's Spam detector too strong

Quote from: sinewave
Its so bad for me that I have to forward the spams from the webmail spam folder to my machine to manually check at home. It makes the PN spam checker completely pointless to me.

An alternative would be to set up your mail client to pick up your emails using IMAP. To do this you'd create an account using imap.plus.net as the incoming mail server address (instead of mail.plus.net). Once you've done this, you can subscribe to the spam folder from your machine at home so would only have to 'drag' false positives out of the Spam folder and into your Inbox instead of forward them using webmail.

Bob Pullen
Plusnet Product Team
If I've been helpful then please give thanks ⤵

rwbsmith
Newbie
Posts: 6
Registered: ‎28-08-2007

Re: PN's Spam detector too strong

Quote from: Denzil
It helps to train the software. If you see undetected spam you can forward it to spam@despamchecker.plus.com

Not completely true, only some of the messages are used to 'train' the filter, and that is done manually. 
IMHO the filter is useless, I gave up on it months ago because of the inconsistent false positives it kept throwing up, despite false positives being returned to PN.
Bob S
MrToast
Grafter
Posts: 550
Registered: ‎31-07-2007

Re: PN's Spam detector too strong

Quote from: sinewave
I am getting too many genuine emails marked by plusnet's spam filters as spam.


Quote from: kreynolds
I think that the current level is now just about right.

There you have the problem with content filtering on a corporate wide system in a nutshell.
SPAM is becoming so well designed to defeat content filters that I really wonder if this is the way to go. Since decent filters started to appear SPAM has continued to rise as a proportion of email volume.
You will certainly do better with per-user based filtering, but how many users want to spend their time training filters? My mum just wants her email.
Perhaps better to accept SPAM, change email addresses and develop policy based IP block/pass lists along the lines of the Spamhaus PBL which can get better and don't consume ever increasing amounts of resource.

carrot63
Grafter
Posts: 599
Registered: ‎12-07-2007

Re: PN's Spam detector too strong

PNs spam filter hasn't been quite right since the major collapse last year, and in my experience is just is not good enough to trust. The "mailscanner" feature that comes with my domain hosting package does a far better job and allows you to set your own threshold for delivery, diversion to a "suspect" mail box, or deletion. I left the deletion option off for a while to check accuracy, which is better than 95 percent. More to the point only 8 emails out of 50,000 in 9 months have been wrongly tagged as having a low "suspect" score.
That said, Eudora's junk filter does almost as good a job - and a far better one than the PN system.