How You Can Fight Spam

The brazoslink mailserver utilizes a very effective combination of email scanning, spam rejection and filtering technologies that protect your inbox from viruses and most spam. In a typical week, our server stops more than 10,000 spams and several viruses. Inevitably, though, some spam gets through, because spammers are constantly updating their methods and getting sneakier. What's an innocent victim to do?

If you're like us, you hate spam, and you'd like to be able to do something about it--preferably something easy, effective, and fast. To that end, brazoslink has integrated, among other things, a "smart" scanner into the mailserver system. This scanner is able to make educated evaluations of incoming emails, based on its training--and this is where you come in. You can teach the scanner about spam by feeding it spam. The more spam you feed it, the smarter it gets.

Method 1: Put spam into a junkmail folder. If you use brazoslink webmail or an IMAP client to access your brazoslink email, create an IMAP folder named junkmail (all lowercase), right alongside the standard IMAP folders like Inbox, Sent, Junk, Trash, etc. Then, simply drag spam into that folder. Every ten minutes, the server automatically processes and deletes any messages in that folder.

Method 2: Redirect spam to spam@brazoslink.net. Most modern email clients have a redirect feature, though its location differs between applications. For example, Mail.app in Mac OS X has a Redirect menu option in the Message menu (see below). Click here to view a page of instructions on how to redirect email in most modern email clients. It's important to redirect the message rather than forward it, so that the original message headers remain intact.

Filter Your Email:

Your email client probably has the ability to perform client-side filtering on incoming email, and might have its own built-in junk mail filter. The brazoslink mailserver tags every email with a "spam score" to make it easier for your email client to filter suspected spam. Each email client is different, so the proper use of these capabilities is left as an exercise for the individual reader. The brazoslink webmail interface allows you to create custom email filters for server-side filtering, i.e. the filtering is performed by the server, before your email client ever sees the messages.

Emails with high spam scores are automatically rejected. Emails with medium spam scores--meaning they might be spam--are tagged with a special "X-Spam-Flag: YES" header (see example below), and delivered to your inbox. That header can be used by client-side or server-side filtering to push suspected spam into a Junk folder.

To create a server-side filter that moves any message that has been flagged as spam into a folder called Junk, you must first enable server-side filters for your account. Once that's done, add a filter like the one shown below.