Spamfilters

Use of a spamfilter

If your email address becomes the unfortunate recipient of large numbers of unsolicited mail, then you can make use of a spam filter to reduce the inconvenience. In addition to the filter plug-ins available for your email programme, you can make use of an online spam filter available through your provider. These online filters check mail automatically for spam as it comes through the mailserver.

Advantage of an online filter

The main advantage of an online filter is that unsolicited emails are filtered before the user downloads them (as opposed to the plug-ins, which need to download the emails before unwanted messages are filtered out). Because most unwanted emails are filtered by the provider, the remaining messages can be downloaded faster. An online filter reduces the hassle significantly!

Please note: Many internet providers offer their clients an online spam filter and virus scanner. Check the website of your provider to find out if you can use these services. Some providers charge a small monthly fee (the hidden cost of a cheap subscription) while better providers offer them for free.

Filtered out false positives: just as annoying as spam itself…

When you filter email there is always a chance of getting ‘false positives’: messages intended for you which mistakenly get filtered as spam. Even when the filter is set to the lowest level, there is still a significant chance of false positives (in particular, the standard Gmail filter is known for this). These false positives do not arrive in the inbox, which means important information can go missing. Therefore it is important to check the filtered messages before these are deleted.  

Discovering false positives is trickier with an online filter than with plug-ins. Each plug-in filters the unwanted messages into a folder in the email programme, while the online filter can either forward the messages to another email address, or leave them on the server

When messages from your organisation end up in the spam box

Occasionally messages from your organisation may be seen as spam or are blocked by your mailserver. These then disappear into your spambox and will not appear in your inbox. To prevent this add the domain e-captain.nl to your safe sender list. Instructions for how to do this in the most common email programmes are below.

Windows Live/Hotmail (Outlook)

Add e-Captain e-mail address as a safe sender:

• Log-in to your windows live mail account
• Open an e-mail from your organisation
• Click Mark as safe, above the message

Add your organisations email address to your contacts:

• Click on the button People
• Click on New
• Enter the name in the field, Name
• Enter the email address (e-captain.nl) in the field private email address

Outlook 2003

Add the e-Captain address to your address book:

• Right click on the subject line of an email sent by your organisation.
• Choose the option Add sender to Address book 
• Click Choose Domain

To add the organisations domain to the list of safe senders:

• In the Toolbar options at the top, click the Safe Lists drop-down.
  Note: This is located in the “Junk Email” section
• Select Add sender’s domain to Safe Senders list.

Outlook 2007

Add e-Captain address to your address book:
• Right-click on the name of the sender in a message from your association.
• Then click Add to contacts.
• You may still not be able to receive messages from your association, even if this address has been added to the contact list. You can solve this as follows:
• Click Options on the Tools menu.
• On the Preferences tab under E-mail, click Junk E-mail.
• Click on the Safe Senders tab.
• Tick the Trust e-mail from my contacts also check box.

Outlook 2010/2013

Add address or domain to Safe Senders list:

• In Outlook, go to the Home tab.
• Click Junk > Junk Email Options.
• Select the Safe Senders Tab and click Add.
• In the Add address or domain box, enter the email address or the domain name you want to whitelist.
• Click OK and close the window.

Mozilla Thunderbird

In Thunderbird emails from your Address Book contacts are automatically marked as ‘safe’. The default setting does not automatically mark addresses in the list ‘collected addresses’ as safe, unless you check the box ‘collected addresses’.

• Click on Extra
• Select Account settings
• Click on Junk mail
• Check Collected addresses. (left in the window, in Local folders as well as under each seperate account)

Google G-mail

• Open a conversation
• In the bar above the message click on More
• Select Filter messages like these
• Enter the domain name in the From field and click on Create filter with this search.
• Check Never send it to Spam
• Click on Create filter

SPF record e-Captain

You can use an SPF record to describe which servers can use your domain name to send emails. The receiving servers can then reject emails which come from your mailserver but are not described in your SPF record. By default only the hosting server is listed in the SPF record.

The server which holds the account, ws-006.e-captain.nl, is also the server which sends the mail. It should be included in your SPF record.