Spam Folder

When connecting to our email service over IMAP we will create a special folder named spam (lowercase). If you delete the spam folder it will be re-created next time you log in.

The service will then move messages that has been classified as spam in to this folder. This helps keep your inbox free of spam and you should keep an eye on this folder in case there are messages that are not spam.

Our spam checking system performs many checks on a message to decide whether it is spam or not. One of the checks it can do, is to compare the message with previous messages. -this is called Bayesian Learning.

Teaching the system

If our system is marking non-spam messages as spam, and not marking spam messages, then one way to improce this is to teach the Bayesian Learning system about messages that have been miss-classified. This is done in the following ways:

• Move a message OUT of the spam folder to tell the system it is NOT spam
• Move a message IN to the spam folder to tell the system it IS spam

If you make a mistake, just move the message back.

The process of learning doesn't guarantee that the system will be correct next time a similar message is received, but it should help.

Checking the learning

If you view the 'headers' of a message, you should see the spam report, and a line looking like:

 -3.0 BAYES_00               BODY: Bayes spam probability is 0 to 1%

or perhaps

 0.8 BAYES_50               BODY: Bayes spam probability is 40 to 60%

Here you can see the 'Bayes spam probability' as a percentage.