Get Rid of Spam with Smartmail

The Smartmail email service by SmartSpace provides a number of anti spam and antivirus measure which helps reduce the amount of spam and other threats you might normally receive through the email system.  All this is done automatically, usually without knowing that spam is even being sent to you.

Smartmail has now gone a step further to enable users to help the system identify spam which is not picked up automatically.

This overcomes the problem of more aggressive anti spam measures picking up false positives and rejecting what might be perfectly legitimate emails.

MarkAsJunk2

The Smartmail webmail system now has a button which is marked as Mark As Spam which is an implementation of the MarkAsJunk2 Roundcube addon.  (Read more here).

This enables the webmail system to do, in simple terms, three things;

1. Send Email you identify to the junk folder, at the same time as identifying it as spam,
2. Unmark it as spam if you have made a mistake,
3. Teach the system, over time, about what is spam and what is not.

Login To Smartmail

To login to the Smartmail system, you can go to one of three internet addresses in your favourite web browser;

• webmail.mydomainame.com (where mydomainname.com is your email's domain name),
• smartmailhq.com,
• https://smartmailhq.com (this is the secure version of the webmail system if email security is important to you);
  • Use you email address as the username and the provided email password as the password (this is not your SmartSpace password).

Read more about the email system here.

How to Teach The System To Identify Spam

The system will need at least 200 identifications of Spam emails to start to learn what you think is spam.  Depending on the type of spam you are receiving and the daily volume, this may take weeks or months to start dramatically affecting the amount of spam you receive, but speaking from personal experience, it is very rewarding when there is very little or no spam in your inbox each day.

If you use the Smartmail webmail interface to access and manage your emails, this process will be very simple;

• Each time you receive an email you identify as spam, simple select the email in your inbox with a click, then click the green Mark As Spam icon in the Smartmail interface.
• If you make a mistake in selecting and marking of an email, go to the Junk folder, reselect the email and click the Mark As Spam icon to reverse the process.
• You can select multiple emails by holding down the Ctrl (Control) key when clicking individual email records;
  • Never mark legitimate emails as spam as it will result in those types of emails eventually being rejected before you ever see them.
  • After the emails have gone to the Junk folder, you can;
    • Delete them entirely from the system periodically,
    • Automatically delete Junk emails by going to Personal Settings > Server Settings and tick Clear Trash On Logout before saving.

If you normally get your emails through an email program or client like Outlook, Mail, Thunderbird or any one of the many available, which automatically downloads the email onto your computer or mobile device, you will need to take some other actions;

• In your email settings, ensure that the setting which instructs the mailserver to delete emails does so a week after downloading them at most.
• This period of time should be slightly greater than the frequency you will be visiting the Smartmail interface and viewing your emails via the web,
• On a regular basis you should login to the Smartmail system and carry out the actions above to Mark As Spam.

Use the following as an example of the steps you could take to reduce your spam:

1. Go into your email programs' Server Settings and ensure that you leave emails on the server (after downloading onto your computer) for 5 days;
   • In Thunderbird this can be found at Tools > Account Settings > Server Settings (select the account), (Leave messages on Server for at least 5 days),
   • In Outlook this setting can be found at Tools > Account Settings > Change (select the account) > More Settings > Advanced (tab), (Leave a copy of the message on the server > Remove from the server after 5 days).
2. Every 2 or 3 days, login to your web based Smartmail service and carry out the actions as described above;
   • There is no need to delete or manage other legitimate emails - they will be deleted automatically after a couple of days,
   • If you have not received any spam emails, there is no need to login to the webmail system.

After a month or so of carrying out these actions, you will start to notice a difference in the number of email arriving.

Our experience shows that after 3-4 months, spam emails will be reduced to a trickle.