Way more messages being erroneously marked as spam

[mrcs58]

Since a few weeks ago, we are noticing a lot more completely innocuous emails being marked as spam. We are talking about probably 60% of the dozen or so messages we received daily, none of which are actually spam.

Fortunately we have our spam filtering set to "Mark as spam and move to Inbox" so we're actually seeing them, versus having to take heroic measures every day to make sure we don't miss anything. So for us at least this isn't a showstopper, but it is quite annoying.

Seems pretty clear that someone in Virgin dialled the spam tolerance to a far too picky level 😞

[ALF28]

SPAM TAGGING

The spam filter was not working properly in July but was fixed and has been working for the last 3 weeks, which might explain the change.

see-

Solved: Flag a message as SPAM but deliver to inbox not pe... - Virgin Media Community - 5063387

Most of the genuine spam is detected if the spam filter is selected, I also deliver spam to my inbox.

I do get some genuine newsletters that come up as spam but not always.

The solution could be to switch off spam filtering which is not advisable, or do what I do, use the filters in email settings to filter your genuine emails to folders, I have set up specific filters for some emails so they do not go to the inbox.

The sensitivity of spam filtering is a delicate balance and usually is done using an algorithm, and unfortunately some genuine email can be tagged as spam, but this also happens with other emails such as gmail, outlook etc. where unexpected emails end up in spam.

It is therefore wise to deliver spam to the inbox as you already do, so no emails are deleted in the spam folder after 30 days.

If you have a lot of emails use the search email facility to find the genuine emails and move them to a holding folder.

I get so many spam emails I have set up filters to discard them or filter to spam, which helps to keep my inbox clear of spam.

There are many factors that can cause an email to be classed as spam or even blocked if the the sender IP address is on the spamhause block list.

The email header can be analysed using mxtoolbox which would indicate any reason for being classed as spam.

see-

Email Header Analyzer, RFC822 Parser - MxToolbox

alf28

[Tom_W1]

Hi @mrca58 thanks for your post here in the Community.

I hope that @ALF28's post has been of help to you, do you still require help since your post despite this?

Many thanks

[mrcs58]

Alf28's reply was informative, but not really that helpful.

First, I use Outlook/POP, not webmail, and although I could set up rules to manage the incoming mail, the damage has already been done (pollution of the emails with "<SPAM>") before those rules could take effect.

Second, and more importantly, I do not accept that since whatever change was made in July, the spam filtering is now "working properly". It clearly is not -- across multiple accounts we have received probably a couple of hundred messages that were incorrectly marked as spam and precisely three (all from the same source) that were actually spam. So something is off with the sensitivity.

As I mentioned, this is mostly an annoyance for me because of the way I have configured the spam filtering option. But I can imagine there a lots of people with less technical nous who haven't done that and are missing potentially important messages because no-one told them they now need to check their Spam folder hourly!

[Kain_W]

Thanks for the response mrcs58,

To clarify, through the webmail are the messages still appearing as spam?

Let us know,

[mrcs58]

Yes, in webmail they (unsurprisingly) also appear with <SPAM> prefixing the subject.

[John_GS]

Hi mrcs58

Thanks for coming back to the thread, the ones marked as spam, do they have a link or attachment in? Or just normal emails? 

Best,

[mrcs58]

Mostly just normal emails, one or two with attachments. They include advertising, but from things we have signed up for (so not unsolicited), science news, important messages from our financial advisors, messages friends, a whole spectrum really.

[Travis_M]

Hi @mrcs58

Thanks for posting on our community forum!

Have you noticed if the emails are from a similar address? Is it emails sent regarding the same topic for example if they all had something to do with your bank, have you noticed any pattern?

Regards

[mrcs58]

No, no pattern at all. A variety of sources and many different subjects and contents.