Spam Identification Service

Atlantech Online's Spam Identification Service allows you to prevent unsolicited commercial email ("UCE" or more commonly referred to as "Spam") from reaching your email inbox. The central theme of this service is to empower our customers to decide how they deal with Spam on a daily basis. By analyzing incoming mail to determine if the system believes it is Spam or not, Atlantech then tags the email in the header of the message (typically not seen by the customer) if it believes it is Spam and also provides a rating. Customers can then use this rating to automatically either send an email directly to the Inbox, put it in a special Spam folder or immediately delete it.

How Spam Identification Works

The system works by scanning incoming email for Spam before it gets delivered to your Inbox. When the system finds email that matches verifiable spam message patterns, the adds to the email header indicating how certain it is that the message qualifies as spam; then delivers the email as usual. This lets you decide for yourself how to deal with spam.

As the spam filter analyzes messages, it calculates a score based on established server-side pre-configured rules. The rules are applied to a message and a score is assigned based on the number of rules that match the message. For example, if the date on the message is 6 to 12 hours prior to receiving the message, 0.5 is added to the score. As further example, if Microsoft Frontpage is used to create the email message, 0.9 is added to the score. Also, a Realtime Block List (RBL) and various other "black hole" lists are also checked by the spam filter. (These are sites that keep track of spam and the various places spam comes from.) A score is applied if a message comes from a site identified on an RBL list. The message's final score is the sum of the scores from each rule that matches the message.

After the score is calculated, the score is rounded down to the nearest integer and then in the email header score is placed as a series of lower case "x"'s matching the calculated integer (for example of an email message with a score of 5.6, the header would include the phrase "X-Spam-Level: xxxxx"). The system also adds other items to the header when the score is 5 or greater including a list of items that the score is made up of.

In short, the system takes in your email, analyzes the email to determine a score and then sends the email to you with additional header information for you to decide what to do with the email.

What You Can Do

Once the email is assigned a score, what you do with it is up to you. Here are your options as we see them:

1. You can do nothing. Many customers are concerned that they miss an important piece of email. This service does not block any email from reaching you. It is up to you to decide if you want to do something about it.
   
   
2. You can have your email client move all suspected Spam into a Spam folder. By setting up filter rules, your email client can inspect the header of each email for the "X-Spam-Level" phrase with a certain number of "x"'s and then choose to have the email moved into a spam folder if it is greater than a certain number of "x"'s. You can then review the email in the Spam folder at your leisure to determine if any identified Spam is actually valid email and delete the email you do not want. For example only, your filter rule on your email client could say that any email with "X-Spam-Level: xxxx" or greater be moved into your Spam folder.
   
   
3. You can have the mail server delete all suspected Spam that has a score equal to or greater than the level you desire. By setting up a filter rule on the mail server, you can stop email over a certain score be immediately and permanently deleted. The advantage to this is that you will have less email to review in your Spam folder. For example, you can setup a mail server rule that permanently deletes all incoming email that has a score of eight "x"'s or more.
   
   
4. You can do a combination of #2 and #3 above. For example, you can setup a mail server rule that permanently deletes all incoming email that has a score of eight "x"'s or more AND setup a filter rule on your email client that any email with "X-Spam-Level: xxxx" or greater be moved into your Spam folder. (This is the option that most of Atlantech's employee's use.)

What Atlantech Provides

Atlantech provides this service at no cost to any customer who both hosts their email on Atlantech's main mail server and hosts their DNS on our DNS servers. Atlantech will tag each of your emails and send them on their way to you. How you will use the information we provide is up to you. We have provided examples of client setup and mail server filter rule implementation below.

Atlantech does not provide technical support with regard to the setup of individual email clients and how a client should handle their analyzed email. Atlantech will however be providing a "Frequently Asked Questions" guide in the very near future. If you have suggested questions for the FAQ, please send them to webmaster@atlantech.net.