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Reason email message was filtered?
Question asked by David Cano - 2/3/2015 at 1:08 PM
Answered
I installed many filters on my e-mailbox and now many good email messages are being sent to my Junk mail folder and I can't figure out why. Is there a way to see the reason a message is being rejected, hopefully showing the offending word or phrase? If not, may I suggest adding a simple tag indicating the offending words.
 
Thank you,
Dave

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Employee Replied
Employee Post Marked As Answer
Hi David,
 
You will need to look at the deliver logs as they will show what filter was applied.  Once you know the filter that was applied you can then look at the filter to see what word(s) triggered it.
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David Cano Replied
Brian,
 
Thank you. I've looked all over. Please tell me where I can find said logs.
 
Thanks
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Employee Replied
Employee Post
Hi David,
 
You will need to login as the system admin of SmarterMail and go to Manage | Logs.  There you can then search via email address to find out the filter that was applied. 
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Employee Replied
Employee Post
Just another note: If you don't manage the SmarterMail installation on your own Windows server, you likely won't have the System Admin login credentials. In that case, you'd want to contact whoever is hosting your email account.
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David Cano Replied
SmarterMail is not installed on my computer. It is a feature at my account at HostGator. I guess you mean I'll need to speak to them. Now this has turned into a pain, hasn't it.. Again, I would like to suggest that Smartermail add a feature whereas I could readily see why a message was rejected by my filters. Just a suggestion.
 
Thank you for your help.
David
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Employee Replied
Employee Post
David,
 
Without looking at the emails and logs, it's hard to say why they're showing up in your junk folder. This could be caused by the spam checks that are being run on a system-level, any domain content filters that apply to your entire domain, or any content filters you configured for your own account. Go to Settings > My Settings > Filtering > Content Filtering. What do you have configured here? Check for anything that will move messages to the Junk E-mail folder and check those conditions against the messages you received. 
 
You can also look at the message header for more information on spam weights. Go to the message in your junk folder, and in the content pane toolbar, click View > Header. If you look near the bottom, you'll see the TotalSpamWeight for that message. This can be an indication of whether the message was caught up in spam filtering. If you have a spam weight of 0, or something that indicates zero spam, the message is likely there because of a content filter. Now, it could be hard to determine what indicates the spam filter catching it, as the spam weights are subjective to the spam checks that are configured by the System Administrator, but it's a starting point.
 
Furthermore, if you go to Settings > My Settings > Filtering > Spam Filtering you'll see some more spam options. The Domain Administrator has the choice of allowing end users to adjust their spam weight actions. If they allow this, you'll see the option on the Options tab to "Override spam settings for this account". This will allow you to go to the Actions tab and adjust where messages with specific spam weights will go. Keep in mind, that the spam checks used to determine the weight are only configurable by the System Administrator, so you'd have to contact HostGator in regards to those. If you want, you can adjust these to Add Text to Subject. Doing this will send any messages that are determined to be spam to your inbox with a configurable message in front of the subject. If you have all spam being delivered to your inbox and you're still getting messages in your junk folder, you can scratch off the spam checks as the culprit.   
 
I hope I was able to explain this a bit more for you and offer some useful suggestions. In the end, it will probably be quicker to get in contact with HostGator. They should be able to simply view the logs and headers and let you know what's going on with your messages. Best of luck! 
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David Cano Replied
Hi Andrea, I just looked at the header of an offending message and found this: X-SmarterMail-Spam: SPF_Pass, ISpamAssassin 1 [raw: 0], DK_None, DKIM_None X-SmarterMail-SpamDetail: 0.7 S25R_1 S25R: Bottom of rDNS has num, non-num, num X-SmarterMail-TotalSpamWeight: 1 Does this mean something to you?
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Employee Replied
Employee Post
I'm not terribly technical and the spam weights can vary depending on how the spam checks are configured, so take this with a grain of salt. But to me, that looks like a really low spam score. I'd look into what content filters are set up, both at your user level and on a domain level. To see if there are any domain level content filters, you'd have to reach out to HostGator, unless you do have Domain Administrator access.

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