Advanced Spam Filtering

My spam filter is working well, but how do I avoid sorting through all the messages in my Spam folder to find false positives (legitimate email)?

We recommend you first train your spam filter according to the general instructions until it is mature, i.e. has classified 1000 "innocent" (legitimate) messages. Once this threshold is reached, only sporadic training is required to maintain your filter and keep it tuned to new types of incoming spam.

It might then become tedious to sort through all the messages in your Spam folder to find possible false positives (legitimate, misclassified messages), and the following explains how to avoid sorting through the messages most likely to be spam.

The internal Runbox spam filter actually consists of two separate anti-spam systems working together: SpamAssassin, a rule- and signature-based spam filter, and Dspam which is your own, trainable spam filter and personal spam token database. Both spam systems scan incoming messages and insert message header tags specifying whether or not they are considered to be spam. Before the messages are delivered to your account, the actual spam filter sorts messages tagged as "spam" to your Spam folder.

Because most spam is caught by SpamAssassin and is extremely unlikely to be actual spam, it is possible to set up a manual filter to separate the "SpamAssassin-spam" from the "Dspam-spam" and save the messages most likely to be spam to a separate folder. You can then largely ignore this folder and only scan your "Dspam" folder for possibly misclassified messages. To keep your trainable spam filter up-to-date it's important that you consistently correct it whenever it makes a mistake.

To set up advanced spam filtering, follow this procedure. Note: Omit the quotes when typing in the input fields.

1. In Webmail, create a folder called "Spam", and another one called "SpamMaybe".
2. In Manager:Filter, set your spam filter to save spam to folder "SpamMaybe".
3. In Manager:Filter, create a manual filter with the following parameters:
   Messages where: [Header] [contains] "X-Spam-Flag: YES" will be [saved to folder] "Spam".
   The filter's priority must be set to "-2" (minus two).

You can now quite safely ignore your "Spam" folder and only scan the "SpamMaybe" folder for misclassified legitimate email.

Note that your spam filter should be mature before this is attempted, as internal training of the trainable spam filter is bypassed in the above setup. Also, messages caught by Dspam (not by SpamAssassin) will bypass your whitelist.

More information in the Runbox Forum:

• DSpam into separate folder
• How To Improve SPAM Filtering using Runbox Filters

Help references

• Filter: Filter Contents TOC The Filter level in Manager lets you reject email containing viruses, block unwanted senders and sort or reject suspected unsolicited junkmail ...

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