email spam filtering

With the recent increase in the volume of spam being sent over the internet, Aqua Technologies have now introduced spam filtering to their email servers to aid users in identifying and filtering spam.

The system used identifies messages it believes are spam by cross-reference sending servers with databases of known spammers, heuristically scanning messages and assigning a spam "score". The rating of the message is performed by SpamAssassin.

High scoring messages will have the message :

[SPAM Score nn.nn - see www.aqnet.co.uk/spam]

as a prefix to the message subject.

This is based upon the message scoring over 5 in it's ranking.

All messages passing through the servers will be ranked and have information relating to their ranking placed in their email headers. Users can use this information to set up their own rules locally on how they wish to process the emails.

We are NOT blocking the emails, solely 'marking' them. This is to assist users in their own filtering process. We are not blocking messages because it is widely accepted that anything up to 10 % of valid messages can erroneously be identified as spam by spam filters. It needs to be up to the user to decide which messages they wish to keep and which to delete.

The only exception to this is if the spam score exceeds 20 in which case it is 99.9996% likely to be a spam message and is therefore blocked.