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Network Kontrol's mail service was built to be spam-free, as practicality allows. That means these servers
do not allow any of the following:
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 | Open relaying; email can't simply be sent by anyone | |
| Emailing to non-users; names made-up by senders who don't know us | |
| Repetitious attempts to receive the same content, advertising nobody would want | |
| Sending or receiving any email containing a known virus
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| How to stop spam
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| Your email provider probably has configurable options for filtering out unwanted advertising
messages before they reach the inbox. You will be looking for options like: |
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| Flagging or deleting spam | |
| Admin user for domain, if you're hosting a site
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| Most people only need to worry about the first options. Flagging means you get warnings
like ****SPAM**** in the subject line or content when your message is from a likely spammer. Deleting spam means you
won't even see those messages, so use with caution. |
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Try testing by flagging spam for a few days, to be sure that no marked messages are 'false positives', before
committing to the delete option. |
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The domain admin user is notified of attempts to email non-users on the same domain, usually as delivery failures. So a message for
<not_a_user@domain.com> goes to someone like <admin@domain.com>. A site administrator may also elect to have
all spam sent to one mailbox. |
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Those last options are really only for site admins. With a big email provider like Hotmail, your site administrator
is going to be somebody else. But you should at least have control over message flagging; try checking options in the 'spam' mailbox when you log on.
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| Is your desktop client trashing spam? |
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If you access email with a desktop client like Outlook or Eudora, messages marked as spam may already be going to the trash
mailbox, so you don't have to sort them from wanted messages. This is a popular processing option when messages have been flagged as spam at the
mail server first. If your mail server deletes spam, you won't even get those messages so no need for filtering options.
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Check the Tools->Options->Junk Email or Tools->Filters, depending on which client you are using. If explicitly asked to define a rule,
you want to trash messages with ****SPAM**** in the subject line. Also check whether 'empty Trash on exit' is selected if you want that.
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| Does deleting stop (or discourage) any more spam? |
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No. Once a mailserver decides to accept a message, it is likely nothing from that point on will make any
difference to the sender of a typically-faked email. |
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The diagram on the right shows the normal path of a received email. Note that only the mailserver is really able to 'return to sender'. As
spammers often fake the return path, the 'From:' field in the message header, a reply may not even reach the originating
server. The receiving server, however, can bounce the message straight back to the network it came from. While the return path most likely won't be
a proper user there, it at least lets someone at that end know that the intended recipient(s) will not receive that mail.
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The order of processing is not always strictly as shown. If you use Firefox or IE to log on at Yahoo or Hotmail, a web server is playing the role of the client
computer.
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| Network Kontrol's incoming mail is checked for viruses/spam before any other processsing, so other networks are notified if they are sending
unwanted mail. Many ISP's prohibit bulk emailing, and encourage other service providers to notify them if spam originates from their networks.
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