Filter

Contents

The Filter level in Manager lets you reject email containing viruses, block unwanted senders and sort or reject suspected unsolicited junkmail (spam), as well as sort your email in a number of different ways. Select what criteria you want incoming email to match, and what action should be taken. You can set up as many filters as you'd like; a new one will appear for each previous one you save. Your email will "fall" through the filters you have set up, one beneath the other. For each filter some email may be retained, while the rest fall through to the next one, and so on.

Unwanted email protection

The Unwanted email protection settings are found at the top of the Filter page in the Manager section of the service, and protects your mailbox from potentially harmful email and spam.

Scan for viruses

This option lets you have email containing suspected harmful contect (various viruses, Trojans, worms and other code which can infect your computer), rejected by our server. Note that you will not see, or be notified of, such email. Most users running Windows and using no other comprehensive email virus scanning software on their Runbox email should enable this option.

See also Anti-virus Info.

Detect junk mail

The Runbox spam filter catches unsolicited junk email before it reaches your Inbox. It works on all email you consolidate in Runbox, and regardless of whether you read your email via webmail, POP, IMAP, WAP or any combination of those.

You have three options for activating spam filtering:

• Yes, save to [folder name]
  This option for basic spam filtering is activated by default, and saves messages the caught as "spam" to your Trash folder or another folder of your choice. Basic spam filtering is powered by SpamAssassin, a rule- and signature-based spam filter that will catch 80-90% of incoming spam.
  
  To simplify the task of screening possible misclassified spam, we recommend that you create a new folder "Spam" and set your spam filter to sort spam messages to that folder instead of "Trash". Please note that you must empty your spam folder of choice periodically.
  Users who opt to receive commercial email or mailing list email (including Yahoo Groups subscribers) might want to deactivate the spam filter because it tends to classify such messages as spam.

• Use trainable spam filter
  This option, powered by Dspam, activates the "intelligent", trainable spam filter. Dspam is resource-intensive and not activated by default, but we recommend you turn it on if you process all your email manually. The trainable filter analyzes all incoming email statistically to determine what messages are likely to be spam, based on the words and word combinations in messages previously trained. It works in conjunction with the basic spam filtering, and will help keep up to 99% of incoming spam away from your Inbox.
  
  Using your trainable spam filter
  Activating the trainable filter will add "Report Spam" and "Not Spam" links in Webmail, for training messages as "spam" or "ham" (legitimate email). As you keep correcting your trainable filter (by checking messages and clicking the "Report spam"/"Not spam" links) it will become increasingly better at distinguishing "spam" from "ham" much like you would yourself. Clicking Not spam will also whitelist the sender address. Please note that spam increasingly uses the recipient's own address or domain as the forged sender address, so take care not to whitelist your own (main) address.
  
  Avoid confusing your filter
  Spammers are increasingly attempting to confuse intelligent spam filters by sending messages containing random words or excerpts from literary works. These messages aren't "spam" in the ordinary sense, but are meant to poison your trainable spam filter by making you report them as "Spam". Unwanted messages that contain random words without the usual spam characteristics (advertisements) should just be deleted to avoid confusing your spam filter.
  
  Maintaining your filter
  After a while the filter might become too strict, so it's important that you monitor your Spam folder for messages that have been erroneously caught. As your filter becomes more accurate and approaches the correct balance between "spam" and "ham", it may only require sporadic fine-tuning and still catch more than 99% of incoming spam.

• Reject if possible
  When activated, this option causes the system to reject any email presumed to be spam, before it is accepted by our servers. You will never see the email, and it will if possible send a rejection notification to the sender. In some cases rejection will not be technically possible, and the email will instead be filtered to your spam folder.
  It is strongly advised that users do not use this feature. Because of the nature of the feature it is more likely to reject valid messages that were misclassified as spam than it is to reject spam.
  Rejecting messages may cause problems with mailinglists such as Yahoo! Groups since it will bounce the message back to the group.

See also Anti-spam Info, Blocking Spam, and Advanced Spam Filtering for more information on fighting spam.

Block sender/Whitelist

Two functions related to the spam filtering, are Block sender and Whitelist.

• Block sender lets you add sender's addresses and domains from which you never want to receive email. You can add new entries directly from email you receive, via the Block sender/domain links in the upper right hand corner of received email (Webmail only), or add them manualy to the list on the Filter page.
  Note: "Block sender" is not an effective tool for blocking spam since most spammers do not use their real addresses in the From field. Consider using the spam filtering options instead.
• The whitelist lets you add addresses and domains from which you always want to receive mail, no matter how high the spam score is. This is useful for regular contacts, as well as for newsletters and other email susceptible to being considered spam. Addresses from your address book are automatically whitelisted. Please note that the whitelist only applies to the spam filter, and does not have any effect of what is entered in the Block sender list.
  Note: To Block or Whitelist entire domains use the form "@domainname.tld". For example, adding "@runbox.com" to the Whitelist will whitelist all Runbox.com addresses.

Autoreply

You can now set an Autoreply message from the Manager:Filter section by setting a subject and a message. If the left empty, the subject of the message will be "Re: [original subject]".

Note that autoreplies:

• ...will only be sent to messages addressed to you personally.
• ...will only be sent once per week to the same address. To reset this recipient list, set Autoreply to Inactive, Save Settings, and re-activate.

Manual filters

Manual filters allow great flexibility in sorting your incoming email according to your criteria.

Matching

When setting up a filter, first choose which header field you want to filter by, e.g. the message's To, From, Subject, or Body field, from the first drop-down menu.

In the next menu (to the right) you choose whether the given field in your emails should or should not contain the text string which you enter in last the field on the right.

Action

On the next line, you choose how the email that match your criteria will be handled. Note how the different menu options work, as they affect all subsequent email processing:

• Saved to folder saves the email in the folder you specify, skipping any other filters and going directly to the Access level.
• Forwarded to sends a copy of the email to another email address while retaining the original email and allowing it to pass down to other filters and to the Access level.
• Redirected to sends the original email to another email address and does not allow it to pass down to the next filter or the Access level.
• Sent as alert to sends a short message with only the sender and subject of the email - convenient for instance if you can receive SMS messages on your mobile phone.
• Deleted permanently deletes the email, not allowing it to be accessed at all.

In the last field you enter the email address(es) or folder you want the email meeting your defined criteria sent to. Separate multiple addresses by using a comma or semicolon and a space. You can only specify one folder for each filter. All email that remains after the filtering process will continue down to the Access level and thus be accessible in your Webmail Inbox as well as through other, local email clients.

Active/inactive

Make sure the "Active" option above your filter is selected. The "inactive" option is convenient if you want the settings stored but not active. Click [Save settings] to store the configurations, and a new, empty entry will appear below the one you just saved.

Order

When creating a new filter, it will appear after any other existing filters you have previously set up and will thus be processed last, unless you enter a number in the "Order" field. You can re-order all your filters by entering a number in their "Order" fields and clicking [Save settings].

• More information: Order Values for Filter Processing

Deleting a filter

If you want to delete a filter, check the "Delete" box to the right in the filter before clicking [Save settings].

Note: Make sure that you do not set up filters that forward to your own account, even via domains or aliases you have set up with Runbox. Doing so will create an email loop and effectively stop email delivery to your account altogether.

Examples

To delete all email where the "subject" field contains the word "free", you would enter:

To forward all the remaining email where the "from" field doesn't contain "work.com" to a family member at "esmith@home.com":

To save all the remaining email where the "to" field contains "jsmith@company.com" to the folder "Work":

All remaining email will continue down to the Access level, and will be accessible in your Webmail Inbox as well as other email clients.