The fight against Spam: How to manage your Spam settings
With the festive season around the corner, Hetzner envisages an increase in Spam mail. We recommend that you actively manage your Spam Filter to avoid Spam mail from intruding your inbox.
Here’s how Hetzner’s Spam Filter works:
All incoming emails are automatically scanned to determine if the message meets specifically defined spam criteria. konsoleH’s spam Filter is built around a set of spam rules that have been carefully developed to provide you protection from spam while reducing the number of valid email message that may be mistakenly categorized as spam, otherwise known as ‘False Positives’.
All incoming emails are evaluated against these rules and are assigned a ‘spam score’. This score determines whether the message will be classified as spam.
For the standard filtering, the threshold is set at 5, meaning any message with a score of 5 or higher is classified as spam and is sent straight to the Spam Bucket. Emails that have a score of less than ‘5’ are delivered to your inbox. Should a message score exceed 30, the message is rejected outright.
It is important to note that the higher you place your threshold, the more Spam will pass through to your inbox. However, should you decide to place the threshold at a value of 1’, or ‘2’, this can result in an increased amount of ‘False Positives’ as this is an incredibly aggressive setting. You will need to check your Spam Bucket regularly and will have to make use of konsoleH’s WebMail facility to access your Spam Bucket.
The ‘Aggressive Spam filtering’ option allows you to customise the intensity with which our Spam filtering software scores your incoming email based on a number of pre-selected criteria.
Three basic levels are provided: lenient; medium and aggressive. If your Spam filter is enabled and you are still finding that a significant amount of Spam finds its way into your inbox, then enabling Aggressive Spam Filtering will allow you to set stricter scoring levels.
Here’s how to change your Spam Filer settings:
1. Browse to konsoleH (http://myaccount.hetzner.co.za)
2. Log in with your Client number and Management password
3. Select or search for a domain
4. Click on the 'Mail' option under the 'Hosting Services' menu
5. Select 'Spam Filter'
6. Click 'Edit Threshold'
7. Select the 'New Score' from the dropdown list
8. Click 'Save'
9. Select ‘Aggressive Filtering’
10. Select ‘Enable’
11. Choose your preferred aggression level from the dropdown list
12. Click ‘Save’
While there isn’t a spam filter program on the market that can claim to catch 100% of spam, we’re confident that our spam filter radically reduces the amount of spam entering your inbox.
