Anti-Spam Solutions from CTC

Anti Spam Solutions - Managing Spam on your CTC email account

What is spam?
"Unsolicited junk email - generally advertising for some product sent wide-scale to a mailing list or newsgroup. There are a number of ways you can find yourself on a spammer's email list, including signing up for newsletters that sell lists of their clients' email addresses, listing your email address on a webpage or newsgroup, or even by choosing an email address that spammers may be able to guess." (Ref: The Concise Tech Encyclopaedia)

Is an anti-spam solution active on my email account?
By default, all email accounts managed by CTC are not activated for Spam protection. To find out if you have an anti-spam solution activated on your account you can either

1. Find out yourself
Log into your webmail account from the CTC Homepage at www.ctc-solutions.co.uk
(If you are using webmail for the first time, the system might ask you to check your configuration. Unless you plan to use webmail all the time, you can accept the default settings and click "Save" at the bottom of the page)

Once in webmail, click on the folder icon located on the toolbar at the top left corner of the page (see picture below). A list of folders will be displayed.

If you see two folders called "Spam" and "Probably Spam", an anti spam solution is currently active on this email account.
If you see a folder called "Old Spam", an anti spam solution was previously used on your account but is now inactive.

If none of these folders appear in that list, your account is deactivated for spam protection.

OR

2. Ask us
Simply send us an email at mail_admin@ctc-solutions.co.uk with "anti spam status" in the subject line. Please include your name in the body of the mail. We will then send you a reply with the current status of your email account vis-a-vis the anti spam solution.

Why isn't the anti-spam solution activated by default on all email accounts?
All email accounts managed by CTC are not activated for an anti spam solution by default. The reason being, most of our clients find that a large percentage of their email addresses do not receive spam. This is because to be susceptible to spam you need an email address that has been added to mailing lists or is used on a public web page.

No anti spam solution is perfect, including ours. When we activate anti spam on an email account, occasionally a genuine email is recognised as spam. Thus we need you to monitor the spam folder occasionally to monitor for such occurrences.

If the amount of spam you receive is minimal you might decide not to have an anti spam solution to save time on monitoring the spam folder.

How can I activate an anti-spam solution on my email account?
Simply send us an email with "Activate Spam Protection" in the subject line to mail_admin@ctc-solutions.co.uk

How do I deactivate your anti-spam solution on my email account?
Simply send us an email with Deactivate Spam Protection in the subject line to mail_admin@ctc-solutions.co.uk

How does the anti-spam solution help me?
The anti spam solution used by CTC Ltd on your email account is Spam Assassin. All email sent to you is filtered by a very intelligent computer program. This program gives each email a score of 0-15 based on certain specific characteristics. Based on the score each email receives it is identified as Spam or genuine email.

All Spam you receive is removed from your inbox automatically. If you use an email client like Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express you will not even see these mails.

What are false positives?
False positives are emails that are genuine but have somehow been identified as Spam by our anti spam solution. This happens rarely.

Where can I find my false positives?
We separate all your spam out of your inbox, so you won't see it if you download your mail using a Pop3 client like Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express. To go through the Spam to identify false positives you need to logon to the webmail system.

Log into your webmail account using the following link www.ctc-solutions.co.uk

(If you are using webmail for the first time, the system might ask you to check your config. Unless you plan to use webmail all the time, you can accept the default settings and click "Save" at the bottom of the page)

Once in webmail, click on the folder icon located on the toolbar at the top left corner of the page (see picture below). A list of folders will be displayed.

You will see two folders here "Spam" and "Probably_Spam". Your Spam folder contains mails that have an extremely high Spam score and will invariably be Spam. The "Probably Spam" folder will contain mails that are most likely to be spam. False positives, if any, are usually found in the "Probably Spam" folder.

I want to help in the fight against spam, what should I do?
The anti spam solutions CTC Ltd uses are learning systems. As characteristics of spam change the anti spam program adapts to them.

When the system makes a mistake and identifies your genuine email as spam you can help us train our anti spam solution. In your webmail when you identify genuine mails that have been identified as Spam (in your "Spam" or "Probably Spam" folders), open that mail, and click on the button to "Redirect as original" (shown below)

You need to redirect this to this_is_not_spam@ctc-solutions.co.uk"

What anti spam solutions does CTC Ltd currently use?
CTC Ltd currently use Spam Assassin (http://spamassassin.apache.org/index.html).

Anti Spam

Website Last Updated: 12 May, 2008