Incoming NON-Junk Mail routed to Junk Folder. Please assist.

[Beverly]

Hello, we upgraded to a new computer and ported everything over. Everything
seemed fine. About 3 weeks later, we realized that we weren't receiving some
e-mails. I checked the junk folder and it appears that a ton of e-mails
(from contacts that we've received e-mails from in the past w/o any issues)
were being routed here. The junk mail setting has always been set to low.
Here are the issues we discovered:

1. Some e-mails from previously known contacts were routed to junk mail.
2. Some e-mails from new contacts were routed to junk mail.
2. Some e-mails from previously known contacts were coming through, but if
it had an attachment, it would be routed to junk mail.

Here's the actions we took:

1. We first went through our junk mail and selected the contacts to be added
to
our approved senders/receivers list. This seems to have worked (for our
previously known contacts), however, we don't want to continue to go through
our junk mail on a daily basis to search for e-mails from new clients.

2. We also checked the option to trust e-mail from “my Contactsâ€.

3. We had the Geek Squad (from Best Buy) come over and take a look. They
changed the junk mail setting to "no automatic filtering" and then changed it
back to "low", in the hopes that it would reset the junk mail settings. Now,
there's no way to test if this works (other than to continue to check our
junk mail box on a daily basis).

4. We just tried this: As for the attachments issue, go to tools>>trust
center. On the Automatic download section make sure the "Don't download
pictures"
option is UNCHECKED and the permit download options (in grey) are all
checked.

Does anyone know what our problem is and if it was indeed fixed? I did a
search here and it seems that no one else has encountered this particular
issue. Please
assist us as this e-mail is being used for business and it affects us when we
aren't receiving work-related e-mails on a timely basis! Thank you for your
time.

PS. We have NO rules set at all.

 

[VanguardLH]

Hello, we upgraded to a new computer and ported everything over. Everything
seemed fine. About 3 weeks later, we realized that we weren't receiving some
e-mails. I checked the junk folder and it appears that a ton of e-mails
(from contacts that we've received e-mails from in the past w/o any issues)
were being routed here. The junk mail setting has always been set to low.
Here are the issues we discovered:

1. Some e-mails from previously known contacts were routed to junk mail.
2. Some e-mails from new contacts were routed to junk mail.
2. Some e-mails from previously known contacts were coming through, but if
it had an attachment, it would be routed to junk mail.

Here's the actions we took:

1. We first went through our junk mail and selected the contacts to be added
to
our approved senders/receivers list. This seems to have worked (for our
previously known contacts), however, we don't want to continue to go through
our junk mail on a daily basis to search for e-mails from new clients.

2. We also checked the option to trust e-mail from ´my Contacts¡.

3. We had the Geek Squad (from Best Buy) come over and take a look. They
changed the junk mail setting to "no automatic filtering" and then changed it
back to "low", in the hopes that it would reset the junk mail settings. Now,
there's no way to test if this works (other than to continue to check our
junk mail box on a daily basis).

4. We just tried this: As for the attachments issue, go to tools>>trust
center. On the Automatic download section make sure the "Don't download
pictures"
option is UNCHECKED and the permit download options (in grey) are all
checked.

Does anyone know what our problem is and if it was indeed fixed? I did a
search here and it seems that no one else has encountered this particular
issue. Please
assist us as this e-mail is being used for business and it affects us when we
aren't receiving work-related e-mails on a timely basis! Thank you for your
time.

PS. We have NO rules set at all.

If this e-mail is for business (which it sounds to be), NEVER employ any
anti-spam scheme that involves the Bayes scheme. That is a guessing scheme
based on a selection of keywords from a historical database of your e-mails
which weights e-mails as ham or spam. It is a statistical method of
weighting e-mails but it is still a guessing scheme. Bayesian schemes work
okay for individual users or with the e-mail client using the weighting to
score e-mails rather than as a good/bad measure. The junk filter in Outlook
is a Bayesian scheme. Also, it does not use a historical database of your
e-mails but instead once per month Microsoft downloads *their* database
which means it includes keyword weighting for someone other than yourself.
Obviously if you were into mortgage deals then a Bayes database established
by other users that deemed all e-mails with dollar signs or "mortgage"
somewhere in the e-mail as spam wouldn't work for you. There are also no
adjustments to Microsoft's Bayes scheme for their junk filter where, for
example, you can establish a lower noise level regarding as to expiry (when
keywords get removed) which would be dependent on the volume of your e-mail
traffic and your desired retention level. There is no tweaking available
with Microsoft's scheme plus you don't use a database based on your e-mail
history. If this is for business e-mails, turn off the junk filter in
Outlook. Besides, for business, you should be employing an anti-spam
solution up on your company's mail server.

Guessing schemes can guess right and they can guess wrong. They all
generate false positives and sometimes they simply fail. Low filtering is
still guessing as to ham or spam. If e-mails from new customers isn't being
generated through a web form where the content is consistent, it is likely
you will get many false positives from new customers. Plus you are using
Microsoft's database for their Bayes filter which could be biased against
the content in which your business is involved.

Because there are no tweaks allowed and because the historical database of
weight keywords was generated for other users instead of for *my* e-mail
traffic, I don't bother using Microsoft junk filter even for my personal
e-mails. I turn off Outlook's junk filtering because it generates more
false positives than with what I am comfortable. The server-side anti-
spam filter (at my ISP) and my rules have provided far better detection
rates than Microsoft's Bayes-like scheme and even better than when using 3rd
party Bayes schemes, like SpamPal with its Bayes plug-in or with SpamBayes.
I grew weary of handling the false positives. That I had to continually
revisit my Junk folder nullified the whole point of expending the effort to
install and maintain a Bayesian solution.

Turn off the junk filter in Outlook. It doesn't use a database of keywords
from YOUR e-mail traffic. It's a monthly database downloaded from
Microsoft. There are no user-configurable settings to tweak the filter to
your needs or based on your volume of e-mail traffic. Businesses should not
be performing client-side spam filtering at their workstations. That should
be handled up on the company's mail server.

 

[Beverly]

Hello VanguardLH,

THANK YOU SO MUCH for your detailed response and advice. I have some
questions for you...

1. We are a very small business... therefore, have no server. However, the
e-mail address (of the problematic acct.) is actually an email address with
earthlink. So, would earthlink be the "server-side anti-spam filter (at her
ISP)"?

2. We have McAfee Total Protection. Do we need another anti-spam solution?

Thank you again for your time... I really appreciate this!

 

[VanguardLH]

1. We are a very small business... therefore, have no server. However, the
e-mail address (of the problematic acct.) is actually an email address with
earthlink. So, would earthlink be the "server-side anti-spam filter (at her
ISP)"?

Earthlink probably has server-side spam filtering on all their e-mail
services. There probably isn't an ISP that has e-mail service that doesn't
have some means of eliminating some spam from reaching their customers.
They provide anti-spam filters not because they are being nice but because
it reduces the volume of tech support calls from their customers.

2. We have McAfee Total Protection. Do we need another anti-spam solution?

I've used McAfee's suite since it was provided by my ISP (Comcast) but gave
up on it due to its impact on the responsiveness on my host. I instead
found other personal and less impact solutions (but which may not be
appropriate for business use). For example, while I do not like the
consumer-grade Norton products, I did like their enterprise-level security
products. The Norton and Symantec divisions don't produce the same quality
in their software.

Many security products that interrogate e-mail traffic do it on-the-fly
(byte by byte during its transmission between mail server and client). In
the past, McAfee operated differently by behaving as an intervening but
transparent proxy. It would accept all inbound e-mails while pretending to
be the client, interrogate the entire e-mail (rather than on-the-fly), and
then pass it to the client while pretending to be the mail server. Likewise
when sending outbound e-mails, it would pretend to be the mail server to the
e-mail client, accept the entire e-mail to interrogate it, and then pretend
to be the client to the mail server to send on the e-mail. This means your
e-mail client never actually connects to the real mail server but instead to
McAfee's proxy. The problem with this scheme is that your e-mail client
might get an +OK status when sending e-mails and move them from the Outbox
to the Sent Items folder which, to you, looks like Outlook successfully sent
the e-mail to the mail server; however, the mail server was McAfee's proxy,
not the real mail server. Then you find out that the e-mail never got sent
out from the real mail server. That's because there was a failure between
when McAfee was pretending to be the client to send your e-mail to the real
server. You won't know of the failure in Outlook because it successfully
sent to the mail server but which happened to be the proxy. You end up
having to check the logs for McAfee to see that *it* failed to send the
e-mail when it pretended to be the client when connecting to the real mail
server.

I have only used the McAfee AV and IS products. I have not used their Total
product that includes a spam filter. That means that I do not know the
mechanisms or heuristics that they employ to tag e-mails as ham or spam.
McAfee is so sparse in describing their features, including their anti-spam
component, that absolutely nothing can be gleaned from their product
description pages on how anything works for their products. Even their
professed "data sheets" are worthless marketing blurbs.

Did you enable the server-side anti-spam filter at Earthlink? Use the
webmail interface to the account to check if the spam filter is enabled.
Even if it is, you had better not configure it to immediate discard suspect
e-mails. Instead they should go into the Junk/Spam filter where they'll be
held for about a week in case you need to recover a false positive.

Some ISPs and other e-mail providers do very well at spam filtering without
becoming a nuisance due to false positives. Some are not very good and you
end up filtering out a lot of wanted e-mails (i.e., false positives).

 

[Beverly]

Hello VanguardLH,

Thank you again for your time and response. I will double check her
earthlink settings. She's always had McAfee on her machine but I think this
is the first time she purchased the "total protection" package and
unfortunately, we have it for 4 years... so not much we can do there.

I guess our best bet is to just turn off the Outlook junk filter. She won't
be happy with that.

Thank you!