Spam filter problems

[#1]

What's peoples experience with the Plusnet Spam filters on incoming mail?  I seem to get a lot of Spam email at the moment. I have set the  filter 'aggressiveness' at 5 and selected the option that spam should be marked as -SPAM-  and moved to the JUNK/SPAM folder. This seems to have no effect, and i don't ever see messages with the -SPAM- marker or any messages in the JUNK folder except for those I manually tag in webmail. I wondered if this might be because the spam filters might not work on catch-all addresses? Any hints or fixes gratefully accepted.

I had a totally unsatisfactory chat session with support yesterday, where I received the apparent standard 'go away and use gmail because we don't support email' response, after the less than helpful suggestion that it was happening because I ought to set up and train the spam filter on my PC  (less than helpful when I might access email from any one of 6 different devices via IMAP).  

[#2]

Spam filtering works well for me with both default/catch-all and additional mailboxes.

The behaviour you are reporting seems to me to reflect that spam filtering is not turned on.

If you open a command prompt window and enter

nslookup -type=mx accountname.plus.com

(substituting accountname with your own, of course) does the response show mx.avasin.plus.net as the mail exchanger?

[#3]

Thank you - substituting free-online for plusnet, i get

'No mail exchange (MX) records available for accountname.free-online.com'

but having a quick read of nslookup, i think that might be down to behaviour at my router

[#4]

Is .com appropriate for free-online? What should be tested is the complete string after the @ symbol in your email address.

Edit: for Free-online (and Force9) the domain string should end .co.uk

[#5]

David, thank you again - I just tried that, with the right address - and got back 

MX preference = 10, mail exchanger = mx.avasin.plus.net

and then the ip addresses for the mx server. 

[#6]

That should mean spam filtering is turned on for the account you checked. Since customers from the older vISPs sometimes have personal domains on their accounts, is the account-based domain name you checked the one you use for email?

If it isn't, the domain name you do use needs to be checked.

[#7]

David,  That's what I thought - and I'm not using a personal domain.  Unfortunately it doesn't explain why the Spam filtering isn't actually ever doing any spam filtering. Spam filtering is turned on, set at its highest level, set to mark spam with -SPAM- and move spam to the Junk folder. I turned 'Discard Obvious Spam' off to see if it was just being so efficient that everything it identified was discarded. I get a large number of messages that are clearly simply and unequivocally spam, and I never ever see one tagged with -SPAM- or that is moved to the junk folder.

[#8]

I wonder if getting Plusnet to reset the email component on your account might fix this?

However something you could try yourself is turning spam filtering off. Wait (say) 2 days then turn it back on again. Since spam filtering is not currently working, turning it off should make no difference. Then hopefully turning it on again will.

[#9]

I've just tried refreshing your mailbox to see if this helps.

This may sound like a strange idea, but are you definitely checking the correct SPAM/JUNK folder? Within webmail you can check the folders it's subscribed to, see if there is a different SPAM one.