How do I utilize YourHost.com's email spam filtering system?

Does YourHost.com offer spam filtering?  How do I utilize YourHost.com's email spam filtering system?

All of YourHost.com's hosted email accounts include spam filtering, regardless of your hosting plan. 

How Does YourHost.com's Spam Filter System Work?

Spam has a relatively unique look/feel to it, a lot of commonalities exist between them. Some of them use an unusual amount of caps, an unusual amount of HTML, an unusual amount of spaces in the topic, the list goes on and on and on.  Our content filter system recognizes these patterns, and assigns a point value to each of them.  The system then adds up the points accumulated throughout the email.  If the point value for an email is higher than the point threshold that we've specified to be considered spam, it will add a specific header value to the email.  Due to its unique set of rules, there's a surprisingly high rate of actual spam being recognized, and an incredibly low rate of legitimate emails being marked falsely positive.  What does this mean to you?  This means that it makes it easy for you to not receive spam without having to worry about blocking legitimate email! (however, SOME false positives are still possible, keep that in mind.)
 

What Does YourHost.com's Spam Filter NOT Do?

We host many ecommerce customers, as well as businesses that can not miss important emails on a daily basis.  What our spam filter will not do is we will not automatically block any emails.  We know how important emails are to many of our clients.  So unlike other hosts/ISP's that block many legitimate emails before they even have a chance to be sent through, we allow emails to come through and let our spam filters do the work after we've received them.  What does this mean to you? This means you will not miss important emails. 

We've all experienced issues when sending to other email addresses before.  Sometimes you get your email bounced back telling you "message text rejected", when you are simply sending a legitimate business email.  Sometimes you may have seen certain blocking mechanism that delays the delivery of your emails, when you may need to send time sensitive materials through.  Other times you would send an email and walk away, without realizing that this particular individual is using an email filter that requires you to click on a link before they would allow your email to be sent through.  All these issues are unnecessary spam filtering techniques that simply cause problems for everyday email users, or users that require important emails to be delivered without a problem.  You won't have these kind of problems with Yourhost.com.

How Do I Utilize YourHost.com's Spam Filter System?

Using our spam filter to filter your email is just as easy as setting up a couple of quick rules (and maybe a folder depending on how you would like to filter).  It is important to remember that it is near impossible to stop receiving spam completely.  Just as our spam filter system grows, spammers get smarter as well.  So the best we can do is to continue to try and outsmart the spammers.

YourHost.com offers different ways for our customers to send/receive emails.  How you utilize your emails will determine how you should setup the spam filtering rules.  Please read below and follow the links according to how you utilize your emails through YourHost.com.  Each links will also allow you to see instructions on how to setup Whitelists.

If you send/receive emails using only our WebMail interface, please click on the following link:

http://support.yourhost.com/kb_article.php?ref=7871-PKLC-9855

If you send/receive emails using Outlook, and utilizing POP3, please click on the following link:

http://support.yourhost.com/kb_article.php?ref=7665-IOCV-4847

If you send/receive emails using a 3rd party software such as Outlook, and utilizing IMAP, please click on the following link:

http://support.yourhost.com/kb_article.php?ref=9466-QOLN-7502

We will continue to add more instructions as we verify more setup steps for other email programs.  You are encouraged to contact YourHost Technical Support team anytime you have any questions or problems.   Please visit http://yourhost.com/support/ for our contact information.