Spam Filtering & Management

Post date: Apr 01, 2010 12:46:43 PM

Google Email filters our incoming email, and provides the ability to retrieve a message flagged as spam within 30 days of its receipt. I would recommend that your turn off your Outlook Spam Filter, since Google does such a good job, and the Outlook filter may lead to more false-positives. To turn off your Outlook spam filter, open Outlook, click the Actions menu, then click Junk Email, then select Junk Email Options. Select No Automatic Filtering then click OK.

• Recovering Legitimate Email flagged as Spam

  • If you have not received an email that you have been expecting, it may have been flagged as spam by Google Email. To check if this is the case, login to your Google Email account by pointing your web browser to http://email.emhs.net. Login with your email username (only what comes before the @ sign) and the password you created when we set up your email account (likely the same as your server password). On the left side of the page, click on the Spam link to view your spam email. Messages flagged as spam will automatically be deleted after 30 days, so it's a good idea to check this at least once per month. If you find a message that should not have been flagged as spam, check the box next to it and click the Not Spam button. The message will be sent to your Inbox, and the next time Outlook downloads your email, this message will be included.

• Preventing email from a particular sender from being flagged as spam

  • The easiest way to prevent email from a particular sender from being flagged as spam is to simply add that sender's email address to your Google Email Contacts list. (Note that this is not the same as your Outlook Contacts folder, although there are ways to synchronize the two. More on that in another post.) To access your Google Email Contacts list, you can either click on the Contacts link while in your web-based Google Email account, or you can point your web browser to http://www.google.com/contacts/a/emhs.net. Click the button with the little person next to the + sign to add a new contact. Any contact appearing in this list will be "whitelisted", meaning no email from them will ever be flagged as spam.

• Preventing email from an entire domain from being flagged as spam

  • But what if you want email from anyone in an organization to be able to send you email - do you have to add all of their email addresses to your Google Email Contacts list? Fortunately, no - there is a better way to accomplish this, through the use of Filters. Let's use Lindale Mennonite Church as an example. If you'd like to receive email from anyone @lindale.org without the risk of the message being flagged as spam, do the following:

    1. While logged into your Google Email account, click on the Settings link near the upper-right corner of the web page.

    2. Click on the Filters link in the shaded area

    3. Click Create a new filter

    4. In the From: field, type lindale.org, then click the Next Step >> button

    5. Check the box next to Never send it to Spam, then click the Create Filter button

• • • Note that it's NOT a good idea to put non-organization specific domains (such as hotmail.com) in this kind of filter, since this will circumvent the sma filter for any email claiming to originate from that domain.

Google Email also gives us the ability to have a Global Whitelist for the entire EMHS.net domain. This means an administrator can add some domains to a list that prevents them from being filtered as spam for everyone with an emhs.net email address. The organizations currently on this list include:

• • Park View Federal Credit Union

  • Eastern Mennonite University

  • James Madison University

If there are other organizations you would like to have added to this list, please send an email to stoltzfusm@emhs.net.