That Pesky Spam

By Justin Moose
Manager of Information Technology

By now, we all know that when I refer to “spam” I’m not talking about that tasty luncheon meat.  Rather, it’s that vast amount of unsolicited junk e-mail that people receive.  If you’re like me, some days you’ll get several hundred messages trying to sell you cheap medications or asking for help in transferring large sums of money from third world countries.

Not only can it be frustrating, but it can take a fair amount of time to sort through all those messages to find the one or two that really are important.

So what can you do? 

Let us worry about it!  Sioux Valley Wireless offers a spam filtering service for only one dollar per e-mail address per month.

What do you get for this “dollar a month”?

We’ll run about 90 different tests on each item of e-mail that you receive (none of which will invade your privacy).  For each test a message fails, points are added to the e-mail message.  The higher the number of points, the more likely the message is to be spam.

What happens to a message that has enough points to be considered spam?

That’s up to you.  Most of our spam filtering customers have us delete failed messages before they ever see them.  But, on the other hand, some prefer to have them marked “spam” in the subject line.

By only marking the message, you can create a mail rule that will automatically move those messages to another folder.  That way, if you think a message was incorrectly marked, you can search for it in that folder. 

What do I do if e-mail messages from a specific person keep getting marked as spam?

We’ve thought about that, too.  If you have a specific person whose e-mails are getting marked “spam,” all you need to do is add them to your online address book at http://mail.svtv.com.  You can find instructions to do this on our web site, just go to http://www.svtv.com/Support/addressbook.html

How well does this service work?

Quite well, actually.  We correctly catch more than 95% of spam messages.  The false positive rate (messages incorrectly marked as spam) is less than 0.5%.  So while we won’t catch quite all of the junk that comes your way, we can very significantly reduce the amount.

Our spam filtering service is a great value for the money.  If you need more information, or if you’d like to have us set-up a spam filtering service for you, please give us a call at 800-616-7888.