If you haven't read it yet, we recommend you review the following KB article which provides an overview of 3Essentials spam protection mechanisms, and explains how training the spam filtering fits into the overall 3Essentials spam protection strategy: Spam Protection: Overview of 3Essentials Spam Protection

This article describes how to train the bayesian intent analysis function/spam filtering function available to customers who have our most recent plan versions which are hosted on servers web12, web14, web16, web18, web20, web22, web24 and web26  Once you've completed reading this article, it's recommended your review the following articles which discuss two other weapons available to you to customize your spam fighting arsenal:

• Spam Protection: Content Filtering
• Spam Protection: Enabling 3E's image scanning spam filtering

Proceeding with the discussion of bayesian analysis spam filtering:

3Essentials has moved to SmarterMail as their new standard mail server as SmarterMail offers several wepaons for our customers in protecting them against unwanted spam mail.  To get the most out of SmarterMail's spam protection mechanisms, you need to tune and train these features... the following details how you can customize the available spam filtering settings at this level to meet their needs:

1. Set spam filtering options for individual users: 
2. individual mail users should log directly into the webmail interface at http://webmail.yourdomain.com, where yourdomain.com is your actual domain name. 
3. click on the SETTINGS pulldown, and individual users will then have access to similar CONTENT FILTERING and SPAM FILTERING noted above, but these settings will apply to the individual user. 
4. beyond the content filtering and general spam filtering settings, the most important and effective spam fighting functionality is the "bayesian analysis".  Each user can tag an email in their inbox as "spam" and the spam filter is updated (on a per user basis)... as more and more mail is tagged as "spam" by the user, then the filter becomes more and more accurate at detecting spam (and applying any action you have listed under SPAM FILTERING options, like tag, or delete).  This is called TRAINING the spam filter. 

For those customers who do not use the webmail interface as their primary mail access, and instead use a desktop mail client: You cannot "tag" email as spam from your desktop mail client (like Outlook or Outlook Express), you have to tag it through the webmail interface.  We recommend taking the following approach:

TRAINING THE SMARTERMAIL SPAM FILTER WHILE USING A DESKTOP CLIENT:
Your standard mail clients (Outlook, Outlook Express) using POP & SMTP will download the mail to your mail client, thus removing it from the server where you could see it from the webmail interface and tag it... therefore you need to adjust your mail client to keep a copy of the message on the server.  As such, we'll take the following approach:

1. Change the configuration of your mail client to leave a copy on the mail server. 
2. Access your mail as normal from your desktop mail client... but also check it daily via the webmail interface.  For any messages that are SPAM, select them, and use the ACTIONS pull down to select the MARK AS SPAM option.  
3. We recommend you do this for 1 month.  This will give the Bayesian Anaysis database a good sampling of what is good mail and what is spam.. and should greatly increase the accuracy of the spam filtering to your specific needs. 
4. Then, change your desktop mail client back to stop leaving a copy on the server... It's IMPORTANT you do this, so your mailbox doesn't fill up on the server.

The following provides instructions for Outlook and Outlook Express for setting the "leave mesage on the server" option.  For other mail clients, please consult the software's documentation for how to enable/disable this feature.

• For MS Outlook
  • Click Tools, Email Accounts, View/Change exiting email accounts, NEXT. 
  • highlight the mail account in question, click CHANGE.
  • on the SETTINGS page, click MORE SETTINGS
  • on the next SETTINGS page, click the ADVANCED tab. 
  • click the LEAVE A COPY OF MESSAGES ON THE SERVER option.
• For MS Outlook Express
  • Click Tools, Accounts
  • on Internet Accounts page, click the MAIL tab. 
  • Select the mail account in question, click PROPERTIES. 
  • on the SETTINGS page, click MORE SETTINGS
  • on the next SETTINGS page, click the ADVANCED tab. 
  • click the LEAVE A COPY OF MESSAGES ON THE SERVER option.