Using Spam Filtering

Spam Folder

If you have a server folder named Spam, suspected spam will be delivered directly to this folder. You should check the Spam folder periodically to make sure that the filter did not incorrectly classify a good message as spam. The folder must be named Spam and not spam.

Correcting Mistakes

The filter will eventually make a mistake. If filter training is enabled, you can teach the filter by contributing to a large shared database of words. For every word in the database, we record the likelihood of that particular word occurring in a spam message or a good message. By correcting the filter's mistakes, you are contributing to the shared database of words and increasing the filter's accuracy. Don't worry: your emails are not stored in the database, we simply update the counter for each word which occurred in your email.

There are two kinds of mistakes:

• Spam not identified: The filter can't catch them all! Some spam messages will sneak through the filter.
• Good mail mistaken for spam: Sometimes, legitimate email that you want to read will get blocked by the spam filter.

In either case, all you have to do to correct the mistake is to copy the message to your Mistakes folder (create one if it does not exist). Messages in the Mistakes folder will be erased once they are processed.

The database of words is shared globally by all users. This means that you must ONLY REPORT UNWANTED COMMERCIAL MESSAGES AS SPAM. That last point is very important. You can tell because it is in all capital letters!

We know that you get a ton of activist email that you do not want. We like to call this tofu. However, you cannot put these messages in your Mistakes folder. If you report an activist email as spam, it makes it so that all similar emails will get blocked for every riseup.net user. This makes the spam filter useless and harms our users ability to organize. Don't do it!

Spam Filtering and POP Clients

If you use a mail client to check your mail via POP, you do not have access to any server folders. This means that for sorting and correcting mistakes, you cannot use the Spam and Mistakes folders. Instead, do this:

• Make sure you do not have a server side Spam folder. You can check this by logging into the web mail interface at mail.riseup.net. Then, write a rule in your mail client to automatically move mail with a subject matching ***SPAM*** to your trash or local spam folder.
• We are working on an alias which you can forward mistakes to. Currently, this is not yet working.