Who altered my mail?

JustNet has installed a scanning program which modified your e-mail. This may affect you if you use JustNet for any email services, including DIALix (for Australian Internet access, GoDomains (for domain name registration) or of course GoWeb for your web site hosting or email accounts.

Why was the e-mail altered?

JustNet has various policies aimed at minimising the impact of SPAM (also known as unsolicited commercial e-mail). Each incoming e-mail is scanned for signs that it may be SPAM, and if it is determined that it's likely to be SPAM, it is altered to clearly reflect this, so that you - the user - can decide whether to delete or keep it.

If you have concerns about the scanning policy, please let us know. Note that the scanning process is fully automated, and the "reading" and testing that is done by the SpamAssassin software is carried out solely to help you identify probably spam emails.

But the message was not SPAM!

Sometimes SpamAssassin will get a "false positive", resulting in tagged mails that are not actually SPAM at all. Since spammers don't usually highlight the fact that their mail is unwanted, unsolicited ads, SpamAssassin has to try to work it out -and it's not always easy to do.

How do the SPAM tests work?

Essentially SpamAssassin uses a large number of heuristic tests that each have a weighting according to how commonly they occur in spam messages (or messages that are less likely to be spam). The SpamAssassin web site lists some further information on the many different spam tests

.

But I Don't Get Much SPAM!

Count yourself lucky, then! The longer your email address stays valid, the more spam you will get.

It may not be a problem for you - yet - but others find it very frustrating. Some recent research has indicated that several ISPs find their incoming mail is between 30% and 50% spam, overall; and quite a few old-timers who've used the same address for years, get over 30 SPAMs a day. In fact, here at JustNet we have a few very old email addresses that receive more than 300 spam emails each and every day :-(

If you don't get much SPAM, you probably find SpamAssassin more annoying than useful. In this case, see How Can I Turn It Off? below.

How Can I Turn It Off?

SpamAssassin can be made a lot less sensitive. The result of all the tests the software carries out is a spam "score" or ranking that gives an indication of how likely the message is to be spam.

To make SpamAssassin less aggressive in tagging spam, you just need to set the score threshold to be a higher number, so the message needs to be more "spammy" before it gets tagged. If you set the number very high (e.g. 99) then basically everything will get through untagged.

You can change your SpamAssassin preferences under the Email Management section of the JustNet Customer Service web site. Feel free to experiment with the settings to get the optimum threshold for your particular needs.

As well as changing the overall threshold, you can easily set "whitelist" entries for particular people if you find that SpamAssassin works well overall but one or a small number of the people you email regularly sometimes gets mistakenly tagged as spam.

If you are not collecting your mail from a JustNet POP mailbox or webmail, but rather forwarding mail to an external mailbox (e.g. BigPond or OzEmail), you will need to change your spam tagging preferences using our external forwarding spam preferences page.

What is SpamAssassin?

SpamAssassin is a mail filter which scans, and attempts to block, SPAM. More information can be found at the main SpamAssassin website.

Acknowledgements

The information in this FAQ is adapted from http://spamassassin.org/tag/

Last updated 07 Apr 2005

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