Spam Filter Information - Conway Corporation

More Information about Conway Corporation Spam Filter

How does it work?
Conway Corporation runs your incoming email through a 4-step process which occurs before the email is delivered to you.

First, your email is checked by a real-time blacklist which makes sure that the mail is from a legitimate IP address and not a known spammer. If it fails this test, the email is immediately discarded; otherwise, it proceeds to checkpoint 2.

Your email is next run through a user verification check which looks to see if the receiver is on our user list. If the user does not exist, it sends a failure message back to the sender. However, if the user does exist, the email proceeds to checkpoint 3. The biggest two benefits of checkpoint 2 are:
- Messages that are marked as “return to sender” are typically deleted off the spammers list
- These fake messages never make it to your mailbox

A virus scanner is used at checkpoint 3. This unpacks the email message and checks it for viruses. If a virus is found, a notice is sent back to the sender and the message is not delivered to you in order to prevent viruses from spreading across the Conway Corporation network and to your computer. If no viruses are found, the email moves to checkpoint 4.

During this final checkpoint, the content of the email message is actually scanned by the server which looks for keywords that indicate the message is spam. Our filter compares the email message against over five hundred rules. Anytime a rule is met, a point value is assigned. The points continue to accumulate as the filter continues scanning the message. If the total point value set by yourself or by Conway Corporation (the default setting) is exceeded, the message is marked as spam, but is still delivered to your mailbox. Below is an example.
<----CNWYCORP Spam Filter----> Save 50% on Via*gra online - no prescription required

How do you control the filter?
You can control the filter by logging on to the spam filter. You will need your email address and password to gain access to the site. After logging in, you can perform the following functions to your spam filter:

Enable or Disable your filter with the click of your mouse
Adjust the sensitivity of your filter, regardless of Conway Corporation’s default setting
- A setting of 1 is the most sensitive and will label a high degree of spam. A setting of 10 is the least sensitive.
Add and delete email addresses to a whitelist
- Whitelisted addresses will never be marked as spam by our filter

Again, Click Here to access our login page for the spam filter.

What do we recommend?
Every user’s spam threshold will be different and Conway Corporation does not want to be the final arbiter on what is or is not spam. However, we do want to help you label it as much as possible, as well as prevent it from being seen upon opening your mail client. This is why we have developed the ability for you to adjust your own settings.

During our testing phase we experimented with several different thresholds. Based on our findings, Conway Corporation is setting the filter to a default value of 4.0. Threshold 4.0 has been found to correctly label 65% of the average user’s spam. A setting of 3.0 allowed us to correctly label 69% of all spam delivered and a setting of 2.5 labeled 76% of all spam delivered; however, these lower settings also increased the number of valid messages getting inadvertently labeled as spam. You will have to decide your personal preference for yourself. By visiting the spam filter settings page, you can modify your personal threshold value.

What will you see when your mail is delivered?
When email is delivered to your Inbox, any mail that was labeled by the spam filter will have an appended SUBJECT line that reads <----CNWYCORP Spam Filter---->. By labeling the email in this way, you will be able to sort all your email quickly and easily. If you use a mail client, such as Outlook, Outlook Express, or Netscape Mail, you can set up a rule to automatically filter the spam directly to your deleted items folder.

Additionally, all emails with the appended spam subject line will have the original message as an attachment. This is done in order to hide any possible offensive materials as well as continue to deliver any mislabled email. However, if the original email message is designated as spam, you can view it by simply opening the attachment.

Finally, you can easily see why the email was labeled as spam. In the body of the message, you can view your spam threshold value and how many points the email message received.

Example:

Content analysis details:   (4.2 points, 4.0 required)
pts     rule name                        description
---- ---------------------- --------------------------------------------------
0.1     HTML_60_70             BODY: Message is 60% to 70% HTML
0.0     HTML_MESSAGE           BODY: HTML included in message
0.1     MIME_HTML_ONLY         BODY: Message only has text/html MIME parts
3.2     HTML_IMAGE_ONLY_02     BODY: HTML: images with 0-200 bytes of words
0.7     MIME_HTML_NO_CHARSET   RAW: Message text in HTML without charset

If you still have spam that gets through the filter without being marked, we have a tutorial that can help your further refine your threshold value. Please click here to visit that tutorial.