Forum Discussion

AKrapt73's avatar
AKrapt73
New Contributor
3 years ago

Spam Filters - Commercial

Dear Forum Members,

I'm extremely sick of Spam, which no doubt is universal. What has the been your experience(s) of using commercial Spam filters? Specifically, are any more effective than COX's brain dead feature? I'm interested in routing all COX email to such a filter, then "whitelisting" the sites from which I want to receive messages. This is the method used at my place of work, and it is very effective. Yes, start up will be daunting, but so is flagging the seemingly endless number of spam messages. Yes, .co.uk earns a special very prolific and annoying spamming notification, not prize. Thanks for your support.

AKrapt73

spam
  • CurtB's avatar
    CurtB
    Valued Contributor III
    3 years ago

    You could probably do that with Webmail filter rules.  Write filter rules to "Keep" email you want to receive.  Those emails are filed directly into the Inbox.  Then add the last (lowest priority) rule with a "Discard" action and no conditions.  You might want to try the last rule with action "File into" Trash instead of "Discard" until you're certain all your "Keep" rules are accurate and complete.  "Discard" deletes with no notification.

    • AKrapt73's avatar
      AKrapt73
      New Contributor
      3 years ago

      Hi CurtB,

      Do you mean "Webmail" filter rules, specifically those available with COX mail? I'm using this method and find it very cumbersome. However, this is likely the situation with all Webmail filters. Note that currently my Spam dispositions are:

      • File into Spam, and
      • File into Trash

      However, there are a few Spam producers that merit "Discard." Thanks for the tips.

      AKrapt73

      • CurtB's avatar
        CurtB
        Valued Contributor III
        3 years ago

        "Webmail" filter rules are actually quite flexible.  However, a major downside is that all conditions are "AND" with no "OR" option, so all conditions must be met.  This requires a separate rule for each sender when email conditions from different senders don't have a common identifying factor.

        The approach I suggested above only has one rule for the other email to File into Spam, File Into Trash or Discard.  (All unwanted email would have the same disposition).  But, you could "Discard" known spam senders and have a mix of include and exclude along with the final File into Spam/Trash rule for all others.

        For more information about using Webmail Filter Rules, see this thread.  You may find that Webmail filter rules can filter email senders sufficiently well that you could change from primarily allowing wanted email to eliminating unwanted email.  For example, you could send all email that contains newsletter@ in the address to Spam.  You could "Discard" all email containing .co.uk in the address if you never want to see anything from those domains.