Anti-Spam Settings

On the VCC mail server, some messages come in with SPAM-HIGH, SPAM-MED or SPAM-LOW in the Subject line. What the heck is this? We are using several spam lists to try to weed out spam. Basically, if one of these lists tags the sender as a spammer, it has SPAM-LOW, two will earn SMAM-MED and three will generate a SPAM-HIGH.

If you find this annoying, you can turn it off. Go to http://vcmail.net, enter your email address and password to enter into your account. Once there, click on Settings, My Spam Filtering and click on Override Spam Settings. If you Save at this point, you will have no messages tagged at all. If you go to the Actions page, you can configure custom actions (like just deleting SPAM-HIGH messages as they are almost certainly spam).

Under Trusted Senders, you can add email addresses of people who have been mis-detected as spam, so they will no longer be tagged.

In Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird or other email program it is pretty easy to set up rules that will park suspected spam in your Deleted Items or other folder. I prefer to put them into a Spam folder, so I opened Outlook, clicked on File, New, Folder and created a Spam folder. Next I clicked on Tools, Rules and Alerts to create a rule that anything with SPAM-LOW, SPAM-MED or SPAM-HIGH should go into the Spam folder.

Now all my suspected spam goes into a folder where I check it for false positives (messages incorrectly identified as spam) and then delete all the junk. Be aware that some messages you wanted will land in the Spam folder (especially those tagged SPAM-LOW), so be careful -- especially at first.

We at VCC have thought ling and hard about anti-spam systems. Some, like Yahoo and AOL simply delete huge numbers of suspected spam and give the user no chance to recover it. We really don't like this methodology. Too many needed and wanted messages are flushed. We had been running without any anti-spam system, but that was nearly as bad. Too manu users were receiving large numbers of spam without the expertise to sort them out by themselves. We think and hope that this method of tagging spam will prove useful to you and achieve a proper balance of utility and usability. There is a feedback/comment button on the bottom of every page of this site. Please use one of them to let us know if you would like something changed.