Support » Email» Troubleshooting the Junk Mail Filter

Remember, once you've setup the Junk Mail Filter, it's important to check the filtered mailbox at least once per week and retrieve any valid email messages that may have been filtered.

» Manage your Cruzio Junk Mail Filter

Understanding the basic and advanced filter features

Your junk mail filter includes basic and advanced features, each of which use different rules to filter messages. The basic features filter messages which do not have your address in the To: or Cc: (Cc stands for Carbon-copy) fields.

The advanced features are more complex. They filter messages that:

• originate from an IP address known to belong to a spammer
• originate from known spam source sites, domains or hosts
• were sent using a bulk email program designed for commercial use
• contain message headers which match the profile of definite or probable spam
• contain body text strings which match the profile of probable spam
• contain body text strings which match the profile of a virus or class of viruses
• contain email addresses or domain names which you have banned
• contain mail in a foreign character set

Each message is assigned a spam score based on these characteristics, and if the spam score reaches the default filter score, it is filtered. The default filter score, and some of the other rules, can be changed by using the "Modify Advanced Features" button in the "Junk Mail Filtering" area of your Control Panel.

Any message can override both the basic and advanced filter features if it matches an "Allow From" rule (unless the advanced filter identifies it as a virus). You can set up such a rule by using the "Configure Filter" area in the "Junk Mail Filtering" area of your Control Panel.

Understanding why a message was filtered

After retrieving a valid email message that was filtered, you can determine why the filter identified it as junk mail by following this procedure:

1. From the Cruzio Homepage, click on the "CHECK EMAIL" link at the top. Follow the instructions to log in to your mailbox. Make sure you check the "Check to read junk mail box:" option.

2. Once you have logged into your filtered mailbox, click on the subject of the email message you wish to view.

3. At the very top of the window pane that is displaying the body of the message, you will see the following buttons: Reply, Reply All, Forward, Delete Prev, Next, Headers. Click on the Headers button. After a short delay, the display of the message will change to include the email headers.

4. Look in the headers, near the bottom, for the following line:

X-CruzioSpamtrapClass: OK

If the headers have this line, it means that the advanced filter features did not block the message. The basic filter features blocked the message, most likely because it was blind carbon-copied (Bcc'd) to you. Bcc is a method used by legitimate mailing lists but exploited frequently by spammers.

5. If the headers have the line "X-CruzioSpamtrapClass: Virus", this means that the advanced features blocked the message because it contains a virus.

6. If the headers have the line "X-CruzioSpamtrapClass: Blocked", this means that the advanced features blocked the message because it was identified as spam by scoring its characteristics and comparing the spam score to the filter score.

Example:

X-CruzioSpamTrap: SpamAssassin Tagged 14.2 vs 5
X-CruzioSpamtrapClass: Blocked

This message was blocked because it was assigned a cumulative spam score of 14.2, which is greater than 5, the filter score.

In order to find more details about how the message was scored, look for a section in the header called "X-Spam-Report:". The reasons here should be self-explanatory, but if you need further assistance, you may call Cruzio Support for help.

7. If you still don't understand why an email message was filtered and would like to ask Cruzio to help, please forward the filtered email message to support@cruzio.com. Please be sure to copy and paste all of the header information into the email along with your request for help.

Understanding why a message was not filtered

In case you are curious why a message was not filtered, look for these lines in the headers of messages in your in-box:

X-CruzioSpamtrapPass: NoBounce

means that this message would have been blocked, except that an "Allowed From" rule allowed the message through the filter.

If you see a line something like this:

X-CruzioSpamtrap: SpamAssassin Tagged 4.7 vs 5

then this message was not blocked because the cumulative spam score was less than the filter score. You may wish to lower the filter score so that similar messages are blocked in the future.