First, what is SPAM?
Spam is flooding the Internet with many copies of the same message, in an attempt to force the message on people who would not otherwise choose to receive it. Most spam is commercial advertising, often for dubious products, get-rich-quick schemes, or quasi-legal services. Spam costs the sender very little to send -- most of the costs are paid for by the recipient or the carriers rather than by the sender.
There are two main types of spam, and they have different effects on Internet users. Cancellable Usenet spam is a single message sent to 20 or more Usenet newsgroups. (Through long experience, Usenet users have found that any message posted to so many newsgroups is often not relevant to most or all of them.) Usenet spam is aimed at "lurkers", people who read newsgroups but rarely or never post and give their address away. Usenet spam robs users of the utility of the newsgroups by overwhelming them with a barrage of advertising or other irrelevant posts. Furthermore, Usenet spam subverts the ability of system administrators and owners to manage the topics they accept on their systems.
Email spam targets individual users with direct mail messages. Email spam lists are often created by scanning Usenet postings, stealing Internet mailing lists, or searching the Web for addresses. Email spams typically cost users money out-of-pocket to receive. Many people - anyone with measured phone service - read or receive their mail while the meter is running, so to speak. Spam costs them additional money. On top of that, it costs money for ISPs and online services to transmit spam, and these costs are transmitted directly to subscribers.
One particularly nasty variant of email spam is sending spam to mailing lists (public or private email discussion forums.) Because many mailing lists limit activity to their subscribers, spammers will use automated tools to subscribe to as many mailing lists as possible, so that they can grab the lists of addresses, or use the mailing list as a direct target for their attacks.
First, review the email that has come in to your inbox that you suspect of being spam. Did you ever utilize the company sending the email for a product or service? If so you may have agreed for them or one of their partners to send you email. Even if you did not agree to receive email from this company, is the email legitimate? Does it contain a physical mailing address and or phone number to contact the company? Furthermore, does it contain a a valid unsubscribe link? If the email looks to be genuine and it contains an unsubscrbe link, use it. The best way to stop getting unwanted email is to tell the sender, if they are a valid sender, that you don't want it. Reporting this email as SPAM will only reduce the effectiveness of our SPAM filtering since it is a valid, bulk email.
If this is a prescription drug advertisement, sexual material, gibberish, a foreign king giving you money, etc then this is probably spam. The best method to report this kind of email is to simply place it in the SPAM folder inside your Bayesian Learning folder. If you use IMAP to connect then you can add this folder to your subscribed list. If you use POP then the best way to report the spam is to forward it to SpamLearn@YourDomainName.com (of course use your real domain name).
If a valid piece of email shows up in your Junk Email folder simply place it in the Non-Spam folder inside your Bayesian or forward it to HamLearn@YourDomainName.com. Doing this will give our servers a chance to review the email and learn from it what does not make it a SPAM email.
If you want to supercharge your spam filtering just give us an email or a call to discuss our mult-proged spam filtering.