webmotive checks your incoming E-mails for certain patterns and sorts out viruses and spam for you. By doing this we usually spare you high security risks as well as unnecessary ballast, interfering with your work flows.
Spam is not deleted during the first phase, because a mail could be falsely declared as spam by us. You should still be the one deciding which messages reach you and which don't.
The spam filter checks incoming mails and determines their probability (the so called spam tagging) of being spam at all. The result of this assessment is stored in the mail header with a new line. This mail header is usually not visible in mail clients and has to be activated additionally.
After the tagging the header includes the following line:
X-Spam-Level: *****
The number of stars represents the probability of this E-mail being spam. The more stars given by the spam tagger, the higher the probability. With a rating of more than five stars you can normally assume that it's actually spam. Hence we move such mails into the IMAP folder .SPAM.
During the second phase of spam detection, mails which were in this folder for more than two weeks are deleted automatically by the system. Because there is no hundred percent certainty, you should check this folder once in a while.
If there should be a regular message between the mails sorted out (so called false positives), please add the sender to our whitelist or send a mail to the system administrators.
The moment a virus is detected, it is moved into the IMAP subfolder .VIRUS of your mailbox. While around 99% of all E-mail viruses are identified by this method, no hundred percent protection can be ensured this way as well.
Hence you should be suspicious opening any data attachments. Clicks on links in an E-mail can also trigger viruses. Therefore make sure, that your local systems are protected by an up to date virus filter.
webmotive uses features of the open source tool Spamassassin for spam and virus detection and adds own rule sets.
