Problems with incoming mail

[shelmart]

Hi, I've been a Runbox customer for quite some time (methinks about 4 years) and am generally very happy with the service. However, of late I have been trouble with some of my incoming mail, despite not having made any changes to any of my settings (although I have recently made some changes to try to better manage my spam filtering and other filtering).

For a very long time, I had my account set to detect junk mail, to save it to a folder called 'junk mail' and to reject if possible. My mail pretty much always seemed to come through; I received all the periodic newsletters that I had signed up for, and mail from family and friends seemed to be coming through -- at least, i wasn't getting phone calls from folks wondering why I hadn't replied to their email.

A couple of months ago, things started going wonky. Newsletters that I had been receiving for several years stopped coming in. Friends started calling asking why I hadn't replied to emails -- but I hadn't received the emails they were referring to. I tweaked my junk mail settings, from "reject is possible" to "use trainable spam filters." Once I did that, I noticed messages being saved to my junk mail folder; some of them were truly spam, but equally as many were not spam -- and in fact were coming from addresses whose messages had successfully made it through lots and lots of times before all of this started.

I clicked the "Not spam" button when appropriate, read the material in this newsgroup about using filters and made a whack of adjustments to my filters, whitelists, and blacklist, and things started to improve: no more email being incorrectly diverted to my junk mail folder.

I thought all was well, until my dad -- whose address is, and has always been, in my whitelist -- called to ask why I hadn't replied to an email he sent on Monday March 31. I didn't get the email. I thought perhaps my dad (age 79, and fairly internet-savvy for his age but sometimes forgetful) had not sent the message, but he included my brother in the send, and bro DID get the message, and confirmed that I was also included. So, the conclusion has to be that somehow or other, runbox ate a message from somebody on my whitelist.

This is pretty aggravating, and I have no idea what I can do to prevent similar occurrences.

I have the exact date and time that the message was sent; is it possible for somebody at Runbox to check logs to see why it didn't come through? Also, can somebody explain how a message from a whitelisted send can end up not getting through to the recipient?

Also, I'm curious as to why this all started happening a couple of months ago. Is anybody aware of any new spam policies or procedures at runbox that were implemented a couple of months ago that applied much more stringent rules? I find it very strange that newsletters that I had been receiving for years were all of a sudden being classified as spam at Runbox.

And finally, is there any way that somebody can take a look at my filters to see if I have them set optimally?

Thanks in advance for any help that anyone can provide!

shelmart

[shelmart]

Alrighty, now I have to announce that I'm a complete doofus! I decided to take a look at my filters to see if anything was awry, and discovered that although I did have my dad's full email address whitelisted, I *also* had a filter on the first part of his address with an instruction to delete the email. I'm pretty darn sure that when I set that filter, my intent was to filter to my inbox. Sigh, must've been having a massive brain cramp that day!

I realize that I could simply have deleted my initial post rather than posting this admission of stupidigy, but I actually would like a couple of my original questions to be answered:

(1) Is anybody aware of any new spam policies or procedures at runbox that were implemented a couple of months ago that applied much more stringent rules?

and

(2) is there any way that somebody can take a look at my filters to see if I have them set optimally?

And one new question: shouldn't a whitelist entry supercede everything else? or do rules continue to be processed even after an incoming message is determined to be from a whitelisted sender?

shelmart

[carverrn]

Hi shelmart,

First, I'm glad you disabled the "reject if possible" option. The Runbox Help states the following for this filter option:

Reject if possible
When activated, this option causes the system to reject any email presumed to be spam, before it is accepted by our servers. You will never see the email, and it will if possible send a rejection notification to the sender. In some cases rejection will not be technically possible, and the email will instead be filtered to your spam folder.

! It is strongly advised that users do not use this feature. Because of the nature of the feature it is more likely to reject valid messages that were misclassified as spam than it is to reject spam.

! Rejecting messages may cause problems with mailinglists such as Yahoo! Groups since it will bounce the message back to the group.

The "reject if possible" option relies on the SpamAssassin (the non-trainable spam filter) evaluation of the message. SpamAssassin uses a number of industry blacklists to check the sending servers status. If the sending server was blacklisted it could have caused your messages to be rejected. This could be one reason why messages from a given address could have suddenly stopped arriving. I've seen a number of times in the past year that messages sent to Runbox support where flagged as spam because the user's ISP servers were blacklisted.

Second, it takes a while for the DSPAM trainable spam filter to become effective. It doesn't simply "whitelist" addresses ... it uses the whole message to statistically determine if the message is spam. It takes a bit of training for it to become effective. So keep using the "Spam" and "Not Spam" links. Training is something you should be doing all the time for a trainable filter to become and stay effective.

Finally, you have a number of Blacklisted addresses and Filters that say to "delete" the message. These can very dangerous because if they match on a message that wasn't spam you'd never know it.

Instead, let the spam filters deal with them. If you created the filters because the spam filters weren't catching them then it would be better to move them to a "possible spam" folder. Then you could skim through the messages to see if any were not spam. Then use the "Spam" link to train the rest as spam. By just deleting them the DSPAM trainable spam folder will never know it misclassified those types of message and will probably keep making the same mistakes.

Your Whitelist and Address Book (which works like a whitelist) only effect the spam filter scorings. They have no effect on the user filter processing.

I hope that helps. If you still have problems we may need to look into the details of some of the messages you're having troubles receiving. I would suggest you submit a Support Ticket for that since we will need detailed information.

Regards,
Rich