What is SPAM?

Generally, SPAM, also known as Unsolicited e-mail, junk mail or Unsolicited Commercial e-mail (UCE), is unwanted e-mail that is sent to you. Usually its subject matter is an advertisement selling a product or service. It can also be a social, religious or political issue that you have no interest in.

How do spammers get my e-mail address?

First, have no doubt, VOICENET DOES NOT SELL OR OTHERWISE RELEASE OUR CUSTOMERS e-mail ADDRESSES.  Spammers have many methods of obtaining e-mail addresses for their lists.  Providing your e-mail address to any website runs the risk of getting spammed.  They also use Internet Chat channels, newsgroup postings, directory services, websites that include e-mail addresses.  They also use random common names, for example fred@voicenet.com runs a much higher risk of spam than fredsmth@voicenet.com.

What is Voicenet's Mail Filtering System?

The Voicenet Mailfiltering System is a set of software programs that runs on our mail server system. If you elect to use it, our Mail Filtering System will examine each incoming e-mail message bound for your Inbox and decide if it's junk mail or not. If the system
decides that the message is junk mail, it gets delivered into your separate,
Filtered Mailbox rather than your Inbox.

How do I sign up for Voicenet Mail Filtering?

By pointing your web browser to http://mailfilter.voicenet.com   But please read this FAQ before signing up.  There are important decisions to make to avoid overflowing your mailbox space quota on our server.  Voicenet mailboxes have 10MB of server disk space, and you can check how much of this you are currently using Voicenet Webmail .  Additional space can be purchased by calling Voicenet Sales at 800-835-5710 - option1

How does the mail filter decide if an e-mail is spam?

The new system utilizes a mail filtering program known as "SpamAssasin™". If filtering is enabled on your account, all incoming e-mail is searched for common patterns and signatures that normally indicate that a message is SPAM. Based on the content of the message, our system will provide and categorize the message into 5 different filtering levels,

What are the different categories I can use for mail filtering?

Very Relaxed: Use this setting if you do not receive much SPAM/UCE to begin with and you would only like to filter messages that are almost certainly SPAM/UCE.

Relaxed: Use this setting if you would like to receive fairly legitimate advertisements, e-mail from mailing lists, etc. that are being caught by the more-agressive filter settings.

Normal: This is the default filtering level and should keep most SPAM/UCE out of your inbox.

Agressive: This option will catch the majority of your SPAM/UCE and may catch some legitimate e-mail from time to time.

Very Agressive: This option will most likely keep the vast majority of SPAM/UCE out of your inbox at the price of occasionally catching legitimate mailings. Select this threshold if you aren't in the habit of subscribing to bulk mailing lists and would rather receive no SPAM at all. This level almost guarantees anything delivered to your normal inbox will be legitimate. Please only use this option if you regularly check the contents of your FILTERED folder and/or your message digests.

Will Voicenet's Mail Filter block ALL spam from my Inbox?

No spam filter is perfect, there is continuous effort on both sides of the spam battle.  The spammers use different return addresses and move to different mail servers to avoid blocking schemes.  The spam filters counter this by adding mail server addresses. Voicenet Mail Filter service allows you add mail server addresses, and reply-to e-mail addresses to your personal block-sender-list.  We find that e-mail addresses receiving volumes of spam will have a large percentage of it blocked by Voicenet's Mail Filter. 

How do I use Voicenet WebMail to read my Filtered Mailbox?

Go to http://webmail.voicenet.com Log in with your username and password, then Select the folder labeled FILTERED from the pane on the left.  You must sign-up for Voicenet Mail Filter service before the Filtered folder link will appear.

What is the difference between IMAP and POP?

IMAP and POP are both protocols for transferring e-mail messages from our servers to your computer.  The important difference is that IMAP allows you to retrieve just the header lines of an e-mail message; "To", "From", and "Subject", without having to receive the entire body of the message. POP requires you to receive the entire message.

Due to this difference, IMAP is the better choice of the two for reviewing your Filtered Mailbox. Once you have recognized a filtered message as being junk mail, you can delete it off the mail server without having to download it to your home computer.  Setting up an e-mail client such as Outlook Express to use the IMAP server is not difficult, but it does require a number of technical decisions concerning optional setup features.  For this reason we recommend the average customer to leave their e-mail program set up as it was, for the POP server.  The Filtered Mailbox can be checked using Voicenet Webmail.

How do I set up my e-mail program for IMAP protocol.

The Voicenet website has help pages for several popular e-mail clients. Outlook Express , Outlook2000 , Netscape-6 , Netscape-4.x , and Eudora-5 .  Most all versions of these popular programs are supported by Voicenet Tech Support. Other e-mail clients are capable of connecting to an IMAP server, but Voicenet Tech support provides limited help with other programs.

How do I check my Filtered Mailbox using POP protocol?

You cannot retrieve your filtered mail using POP protocol. However, you can receive your non-spam mail with POP protocol and check your Filtered Mailbox with Voicenet WEBMAIL .  This is the easiest option for many people.

e-mail that I want to get is being delivered to my Filtered Mailbox. How do I get it back in my inbox?

e-mails can be moved from your Filtered Mailbox to your Inbox folder using Voicenet Webmail .  Once logged in click the "FILTERED" folder, then check mark the e-mail you want to keep, select "INBOX" from the "Move Selected To" menu at the top, then click the "Move" button.  After this is done the e-mail can be downloaded using a POP3 e-mail client program.

If you want to allow e-mail from a certain address to be delivered normally (not filtered), you can add them to your "Trusted Addresses" . 
Browse to the Mailfilter signup page  and log on with your username and password. On the main screen select the link to "Update Trusted Email Address List". Here just enter the address or domain you wish to be unfiltered and click "Add".

There are some e-mail addresses that I NEVER want to receive e-mail from, even if Voicenet does not consider their e-mails to be spam.  How do I filter e-mail from specific sending addresses so it is always sent to my Filtered Mailbox?

  You can choose to block e-mail from specific sender e-mail addresses.  Go to the Mail Filter Signup page.  On the main screen select the link to "Update Blocked Email Address List". Here just enter the address or domain you wish to be blocked and click "Add". For example entering;
junk@spammer.com - will block e-mail from that one address
spammer.com  - will block e-mail from (anyone)@spammer.com
  .com  - will block e-mail from ANY e-mail address ending with .com (not a good idea)

"Trusted Addresses" takes precedence over "Blocked Addresses".  For example, if you "Block" all e-mail from myhost.com, and "Trust" the address friend@myhost.com, then the messages from friend@myhost.com will not be filtered, but all other addresses @myhost.com will be blocked.  "Trusted addresses" also take precedence over blacklist blocked mail servers.

Can I have my filtered folder automatically emptied more often?  I get so much spam that the filtered folder fills up quickly, then my regular e-mail is returned undeliverable.

There is an option on the Mail Filter Signup and Configuration page that provides a choice of schedule for Filtered Folder purging.  This is set to 7 days by default but you can login and change the schedule to anything from every day up to every 31 days.    Those people who receive very large numbers of spam e-mail might want to set this schedule to every day.  This will avoid the problem of a mailbox filled to overflowing with spam.  However, be sure to check the filtered folder if you sign up for a new mailing list, or do not get an e-mail you were expecting.  E-mails deleted from the filtered folder by this process cannot be recovered.

What does the "Spam" button do?

This button will forward the selected message to Voicenet system administrators in order to help fine-tune the filters that analyze the text in your messages. Please be very careful when using this option and only submit messages that are undeniably unsolicited commercial e-mails. You can report multiple items at once by selecting the checkbox next to each email and selecting the "Spam" button.

What does the "Not Spam " option do?

This button will forward the selected message to Voicenet system administrators in order to help fine-tune the filters that analyze the text in your messages. Please be very careful when using this option and only submit messages that are undeniably not unsolicited commercial e-mails. You can report multiple items at once by selecting the checkbox next to each email and selecting the "Not Spam" button.

Can I send Unsolicited Commercial e-mail from my Voicenet account?

This would be in violation of your access agreement, and could result in the termination of your account. Sending e-mails to lists of people who want them is no problem.  However if Voicenet receives a complaint that your account is sending UNSOLICITED COMMERCIAL E-MAILS then you will be contacted by a Voicenet Customer Service representative. Please see Voicenet's Service Agreement http://www.voicenet.com/access.html for more information.  In addition, Voicenet is not the only ISP that offers spam filtering services.  If a Voicenet connection is used to send spam, then we will get black-listed.  This means that all outgoing e-mail from Voicenet customers will be blocked by other spam filters, an unhappy situation.