AustChat Anti-Spam Help

AustChat has recently introduced a new anti-spam system into our email server. This gives all users the ability to filter their email and have spam from ever reaching their incoming mailbox!

This Anti-Spam package is called DSpam which filters email as it is delivered to our email server.

Anything decided as spam is kept in a special quarantine area accesable from an online configuration panel we've installed, accessing it is as simple as clicking on a link and logging into your spam configuration menu and you can check for legitimate mail and have it delivered to your inbox or delete the accumulating spam from your quarantine area.

There are many options such as setting the sensitivity of the filter, retraining missed spam messages as spam and viewing your mail history and spam/legitimate email statistics.

You can access your D-Spam control panel at http://spam.austchat.net

Use your full email address as your DSpam Username ie: myemail@austchat.net
Use your email password as your DSpam Password as well.

Loging In:
Use the above link and you will be prompted to enter your username and password, use the same settings as your normal email account which is your full email address as the username

Main Screen:
You'll find a main screen showing DSpams performance statistics with a menu along the top with the following options:

Performance:
This is where you can see the overall performance of DSpam, how many emails it has processed, how many innocent and spam emails have passed through your mailbox. You can also reset your statistics from this screen.

Preferences:
Here is where you can set training, Message Handling and Other Feature preferences. Many of these options are better explained here in a Wiki (online encyclopedia) for DSpam http://dspamwiki.expass.de/ There are also help files located on DSpam's own website with some explanations of their uses: Running DSpam

Alerts:
Here you can specify an alert such as someones email address, a nickname or a word you want to be shown up as an alert in your quarantine area to make non-spam easier to identify.

Quarantine:
Here is where all incoming mail that is classified as spam by DSpam is kept until you deal with it. You can select emails that are incorrectly identified as spam and have them re-delivered to your mailbox and DSpam will then classify them as innocent emails. You can also delete all the spam from your quarantine box regularily.

Analysis:
This gives you a graphical analysis of the last 24 hours and 14 days of DSpam activity

History:
This area shows you all the email that has been processed by DSpam since your last reset. Here you can select email you have received in your inbox that is spam (Missed Spam) and change its status to spam and have DSpam retrain itself to recognise similar emails as spam. You can also select previous emails and tell DSpam that it is not spam (similar to Quarantine Area) and have them delivered automatically to your inbox.

Retraining DSpam To Recognise Emails As Spam By Forwarding Spam Back To DSpam
DSpam also has another method to retrain spam emails received in your inbox as spam. If you have received an email in your AustChat inbox that is spam, just forward it the special spam email address spam@austchat.net This will automatically detect the email is being sent is spam and was originally sent to you and that you now classify it as spam and will learn from the contents of the email to help it detect similar spam emails in the future.

Remember taking the time to train DSpam with a few spam email examples makes all the difference. If you do not either go to your control panel or forward spam emails back to the special anti-spam email address it will not learn what spam is and hence will not function. It only takes 8-12 spam emails to start the system off and it will automatically start to learn.

Of course if you do not wish to have DSpam filter your email, do not train it or bother with the system and you will never have to worry about DSpam filtering your email.

Why is there X-DSPAM lines at the top of my emails??
These are Spam headers built into your emails. Any email sent or received by the AustChat mail server is tagged with a Spam Header showing the program used to tag it and additional information for the benefit of other email servers and clients. This is becoming normal on most servers now and helps identify spam from legitimate emails.

Why is there !DSPAM:2,44465543179712132451071! at the bottom of my emails?
This is the DSpam signature. All emails processed by the AustChat email server has this signature at the bottom. This is a unique ID that DSpam uses to identify individual emails processed by it. When you forward an email back to your special DSpam retraining email address, DSpam recognises this ID and knows how to process the email in question.

Getting Help With DSpam
If you find this all confusing or just have a general question about our Anti-Spam System please feel free to send an email to postmaster@austchat.net and one of our Admins will endevour to reply back to you as soon as they can.

[Home]