NWOCA's email system provides a number of tools and features to assist its email users in dealing with unwanted or inappropriate email. Some of these are automatic and determined by NBEC/NWOCA and your school district's policy. See filtering policy for more information.
However, NWOCA does not actively filter "spam" or "junk mail", except when we see mail that is obviously unsolicited or users specifically request filtering. Spam is commonly defined as "unsolicited email that the recipient did not specifically or knowingly agree to receive". The difficulty in filtering spam is being able to reliably separate solicited email and unsolicited email.
Therefore, NWOCA's mail system does not attempt to automatically identify spam and block it from all our users. However, we do provide several tools which individual users can implement as desired to tailor their own spam filters. The remainder of this page describes the tools available to you.
Before describing the specific tools, here are a few tips for reducing the amount of spam you receive:
The suggestions above will not prevent you from receiving spam, but they can help reduce the number of spammers targeting your mail box. Once you start getting spam, then one, or more, of the tools below may be helpful.
NWOCA can apply server-based spam filters to your account. However, this service is not applied automatically to all accounts. Individual users may request their accounts be filtered by these automatic rules. If you wish to have these filters applied to your email address, just send mail to less-spam@nwoca.org with the word SUBSCRIBE in the subject line. Your account will be added to the server filters.
Note: It is important to understand that the server-based spam filters may occasionally block legitimate, solicited mail. Neither the sender or you will be notified when mail is blocked. Therefore, it is possible that you will loose legitimate mail using these filters. However, the accuracy rate for NWOCA's filters is quite good. User must decided for themselves whether the value of filtering outweighs the risk of loosing messages.
Most NWOCA users have the ability to have "mailbox filters" applied to their mailboxes. The filters allow individual users to block mail based on "From" address, "To" address or "Subject" line. The filters are relatively simple and are useful for blocking mail from certain sources.
The main advantage of using mailbox filters is that the mail is filtered prior to being delivered to your mailbox so you will never see it nor download it. Filters can be used with regardless of what mail client you are using. For example, Webmail users can use mailbox filters even though webmail does not have it's own filter capability.
However, care must be used using mailbox filters, since it it easy to inadvertently block legitimate mail.
Users can manage their own filters at Manage NWOCA Email Account.
NWOCA's mail system has the ability to identify likely spam without blocking it. As mail is being processed it checks several Internet databases to see if the mail is from a likely or known "spam source". If the source of the message is determined to be a known spam source, then the message is "tagged" with a special mail header called "x-nwoca-spam-tag". However, this tagging of messages is not 100% accurate. Sometimes legitimate mail from legitimate sources will be tagged.
If you are using a mail client (such as Netscape or Outlook), you can configure your client's filtering rules to do something with messages that have this header. You could automatically move the tagged messages to a folder or delete them outright in combination with other criteria.
For example, in Outlook you could use the Rules wizard to create a rule like:
Rule: Move Spam
Rule Description:
Apply
this rule after the message arrives
with
x-nwoca-spam-tag in the message header
move it
to the Spam folder
This allows you considerable control over how the possible spam message is handled. Moving it to a "Spam" folder would allow you to review the messages periodically to ensure that legitimate mail is not being trapped by the filter.
Most modern mail clients allow for this type of filtering and processing of incoming mail. See your client's documentation or help file for more information.
The exact format of NWOCA spam tag is as follows:
x-nwoca-spam-tag: Yes database-info
The "database-info" will be replaced by information about the Internet database that was used to identify the message as a possible spam message. You usually do not need to concern yourself with the database-info, unless you are curious how we identified the message.
When creating your own rules, you only need to look for the existence of the "x-nwoca-spam-tag" in the message headers. If your mail client requires you to check for a value in a header, then you can check for "x-nwoca-spam-tag contains 'Yes'".