More spam getting through to the inbox lately

[mark_schlegel]

I'm noticing a lor more spam (and not discrete spam but really obvious spam with bogus encoding) making it to my inbox just recently. When I use the web mail and manually move inbox spam messages to the spamdetection folder, I really hope that is used to prime a anti-spam filter some where in the system. Does the verizon system do that? Is there something else that can be done to block more of these? Mark

[tns2]

This is peer to peer.  Verizon rarely answers any questions here, usually only doing so to assist those who have open problems with Verizon support and need help escalating a problem.

Verizon's SPAM filter is only so so.  It is actually supported by an outside company.  At one time it seemed to work well, but the new spammers have pretty much figured out how to get around it.  And its inconsistant on who is getting spamed.  E.g. I have two accounts, one gets tons of spam getting to it (30-50 a day and another 10-15 caught).  The other has only gotten 3 spam messages that got through in the 2 1/2 years its been in use with another 2-10 caught each week.

Personally I recommend using web client's with spam filters included or add-on.  Avoid webmail as much as possible.

[mark_schlegel]

I don't usually use the webmail, I go there on purpose so I can flag spam as spam, move it to the spamdetection folder and hopefully train their filters. But it doesn't seem to work because the same spam gets through. I don't understand the spammers getting past their filters because when I look at the spam content it's pretty obviously (the content of the mail just images and the subject lines contain non-ascii binary) spam. Does their filter do anything when we mark webmail as spam and move it to spamdetection or does it just move it and not retrain the filter? I've given up on verizon filtering and will be putting spam blocking in my clients. That's a big pain for me since I have to set up many client apps. I have two laptops and one main PC.

[mjonis]

I'm sure this has changed, but years ago Verizon used to use a product called Ironport, which had a very good anti-spam engine.  The engine was licensed from Symantec, and later the engine went down the toilet.  Ironport then developed their own engine which was pretty good, and later was purchased by Cisco.  Cisco/Ironport appliances had an excellent spam filter (we rarely ever got spam through the system), but we had to tweak the default settings.

1)  Dont' know if Verizon still uses the Cisco Ironport product

2)  If they do, not sure if they adjusted the threshold levels.  There was "positive spam" and "suspect spam".  We chose to block "positive spam" completely and quarantine the "maybe spam".  But we did tweak the thresholds.

3)  The Cisco Ironport did have the ability to be re-trained, but you had to forward the missed spam to an email address at Ironport (they had an Outlook Plugin) so that the MIME.822 headers could be examined.

But based upon the amount of spam that I get in my Verizon account, I'm guessing they don't use it anymore.  Or have it set to not block anything (ie, thresholds are too low).