SPAM SETTINGS, RULES AND GUIDES
Quick Links:
Spam Filtering:
In an effort to combat spam, Q5 Media mail servers now employ Premium Antispam features.
These features use a unique combination of human and machine intelligence that
identifies and blocks spam in 30 languages. The filters are updated several times
a day.
All incoming email identified as spam will have the subject prepended with
the tag "X-IMAIL-SPAM" and some other text to identify the reason the email was marked
(such as "connection" or "content").
In addition to being marked, spam will also be moved to a new folder in your
email account. By default, spam will NOT be deleted immediately*. It will also not
come to your main mailbox (the mailbox you are checking when you download mail for your
username@domain.com account). This action saves you time and effort by only delivering
legitimate email to your mailbox. It also gives you the flexibility to retrieve
"false-positive" spam - emails that were marked as spam but should not have been -
instead of having it instantly deleted.
*Spam WILL be deleted from your spam folder after 21 days.
Spam Folder Reports:
Each day, each email user will get a report sent to their mailbox listing the emails
that had been sent to their Spam folder the day before. You should review this report
each day in case some email was sent to the Spam folder that needs to be moved to your
Inbox. You can retrieve emails from your Spam folder by
accessing your spam folder via webmail and/or
keep mail from specific senders from being sent to the spam folder by
creating a personal whitelist.
Accessing your new spam folder:
You are able to view all of your marked spam by logging in to the Q5 Media webmail
system and navigating to your spam folder. From there, you can view the emails, delete
them or move them to your inbox (in which case, the email will be available for download
on to your computer via your email application).
For a complete guide to accessing your spam folder via webmail, see our
guide to accessing your spam folder.
You can also access your spam folder via POP (download it to your email application
such as Outlook) by logging in with the username user-spam@domain.com, where "user" is
your username (the text before the @ in your email address) and "domain.com" is your Web
site's domain name (the text after the @ in your email address). Log in using the same
password as your regular account.
Whitelists:
It is possible that a company or email user with whom you often do business sends email that is marked
as spam. This may be because the company's email is improperly set up, the email domain
has been added to a spam blacklist,
or the email had content which triggered a spam filter.
If you would like to ensure that a specific email address or domain (the part of the
address after the @ symbol) is never caught by the spam filter, please contact Q5 Media
support at support@q5media.com to request the
address or domain be added to the server's
whitelist. All
requests will be considered but it may not be possible to add every request to the whitelist.
Also, Q5 Media will not make whitelist entries for free mail services such as Hotmail and Yahoo.
You do have the option of making your own "whitelist" for your email account. This consists
of adding filtering rules to your account, at the server level, that checks email
before it is moved to your spam folder based on a set of criteria you define. For a complete
guide to making your own "whitelisting" rules, see our guide
to making a personal whitelist. Note that mail that is re-routed to your inbox with
a personal "whitelist" will still be marked with "X-IMAIL-SPAM" in the subject.
Editing Rules/Making New Rules:
By default, the "Q5 AntiSpam Router" rule has been made for you and your Spam folder
has been set up. In addition to creating a personal whitelist
rule, you are also able to edit the "Q5 AntiSpam Router" rule to DELETE instead of MOVE spam.
It is highly advisable that you do not edit this rule to BOUNCE spam, as this puts undue stress
on the server and serves very little purpose. If you choose to edit your rule so that it
DELETES spam, do so at your own risk. Deleted spam cannot be retrieved.
Account limits:
All Q5 Media email accounts have size limits, which vary depending on your organization's
agreement with Q5 Media. Your size limit and current account size are shown at the top left-hand side of the
webmail interface. Your "Inbox" folder (where all legitimate email is sent) size counts against
this limit. If you use the webmail system
to send email and you save copies of sent email, the size of your "Sent" folder counts against
your limit. Also, if you use webmail when deleting emails and you set your preferences to save
deleted emails, your "Deleted" folder counts against your limit. Now, your new "Spam" folder
also counts against your size limit as well.
For help with managing your email via webmail, see our webmail guide.
For a specific guide to accessing and managing your spam folder, see our guide to accessing your spam folder.
Attachment Blocking:
For security reasons, some types of email attachments are not
allowed to pass through the Q5 Media servers. These settings are made at the highest level
and are the same for all email users. The list of blocked attachment types is as follows:
| .b64 |
.bat |
.bhx |
.com |
.exe |
.hqx |
| .mim |
.reg |
.scr |
.uu |
.vbs |
.wsh |
When an email contains a blocked attachment, the email is still delivered but the
attachment is stripped. A message from the server is added to the end of the email
which states:
"Due to an email security policy, an attachment named <filename> was removed from this message. The policy does not allow files with this extension.
If this is a legitimate file that must be received, you may try the following:
- Ask the sender to use a compression program to "zip" the file and re-send.
- Ask the sender to rename the file with another extension and instruct the you to
change the file name back once it has been received (ex. have the sender change
"filename.exe" to "filename.txt" and you change "filename.txt" to "filename.exe")
Should you have any questions, please contact your mail administrator for more information."
