SpamHunter is a junk email filtering system. There are a lot of questions that people have about it and why we at RTC Communications have provided this service to our customers. So, here are answers to the most common questions asked about SpamHunter.

What is this 'spam' thing?
So what is SpamHunter?
I like the idea. What do I need to do to get this?
Does SpamHunter also scan my email for viruses?
What if SpamHunter junks one of my real messages?
Do I have to manually delete all these junk emails from WebMail?
Okay. What's a whitelist?
I hate typing, is it easy to add an address to my whitelist?
How does SpamHunter know what's junk and what isn't?
How many hits does it take for a message be considered junk?
Can I turn SpamHunter off if I need to?
Who wrote SpamHunter?
I like the WebMail program. Can I use it all the time?
Can I use some other way to access my Junk-Mail folders?
Why is there so much more junk email lately? Is this thing working?!New!
"This image has been removed for security reasons"New!

In internet terminology, 'spam' means unwanted junk mail. It can be adult in nature or commercial or just advertisements. Either way, 'spam' is unwanted, unsolicited junk email.

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SpamHunter is designed to virtually eliminate junk email from your mailbox. Many people have come to 'accept' junk email as a fact of life on the internet. We refused to accept that when we finally got tired of wading through hundreds of junk emails to find the four or five we needed. SpamHunter has been proven to correctly identify 95% of junk emails.

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Nothing. You are already receiving this service. It was turned on for you the day you signed up for service or on May 6th, 2002, which ever occurred first.

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Yes. SpamHunter scans all incoming messages for viruses and malicious attachments. If one is found in a message intended for you, you and the sender will be notified of the fact. You will be sent the cleaned email message. You can turn off SpamHunter's Virus Protection in WebMail.

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Don't worry. In the event one of your legitimate emails gets moved to the junk pile, we have provided a way for you to get to those messages. Our WebMail program allows you to access those messages as well configure your SpamHunter options. Junk email messages sent to you will be stored for 14 days. After that, they will be removed to save space.

If you want to be sure that email from a certain person will always make to you without being junked, no matter what it contains, you will need to add that person's email address to your 'whitelist'.

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No. You don't have to even worry about those messages unless you think one of your real messages got junked for some reason. They will be removed automatically if they are older than 14 days. This gives you enough time to retrieve legitimate mail should you need to.

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Your whitelist is a list of email addresses (or whole domains [ie: jcpenney.com]) that SpamHunter will make sure you get, no matter what the message contains. You can manage your whitelist through our WebMail program. Log in and then click on the SpamHunter link at the top.

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Yes. But only if you use our WebMail program. When you are viewing a message in WebMail, you will notice two links in the upper right corner of the message that will add the sender's email address or their entire domain to your whitelist with a single, simple click.

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That's a very good question. One of the more popular but inefficient ways of detecting junk mail was to simply look at the message and see if it contained any suspicious phrases or key words. If one was found, the message was junked. If the message contained the word 'viagra' it would be junked. But there may be real, legitimate emails from, say a doctor or nurse, that might have that word.

What we do is rate or score the message. We scan each message looking for suspicious things about it. One thing might be excessive use of the exclamation point (!!!!). That doesn't make it junk, but it does count as a 'hit' against the message. If it finds enough 'hits' or 'scores' it is considered junk.

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If five suspicious things are found, out it goes. You can configure your personal settings to change that to six or seven or even higher, but doing so will usually result in more junk email making it through. Five is a good level to be at for most people. That is the setting everyone starts at unless they change it.

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Yes. You control SpamHunter entirely through our WebMail interface. You can turn it off or on as you feel necessary.

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We did. Or partly, anyway. The SpamHunter system is composed of parts written by different people to achieve one goal -- eliminate junk mail. It uses Spam Assassin on a large scale in conjunction with a SQL database with a PHP interface to control it. The SpamHunter Options section of our WebMail interface is something we wrote from scratch as a way to allow you, the customer, control over SpamHunter as much as possible. The core system of Spam Assassin/SQL was designed by Kent Claussen of Claussen Computation System (CCS). Spam Assassin is written and maintained by a large and diverse group of volunteers in the spirit of Open Source.

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You may use it as often or as little as you wish. It is entirely up to you.

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Yes. You are not required to use the RTC WebMail program (but it has a lot of nice features, and it's 128 bit secure for accessing your mail remotely ). If your mail program supports the IMAP protocol (most modern mail programs do) then you can access the folders you currently see in WebMail. In fact, that is how WebMail accesses your mail. You will, however, have to remove your current POP3 account and setup a new IMAP connection to mail.rtccom.net with your previous username and password.

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We are dealing with a new problem with spammers (as is the entire world) in that they are now sending their junk as images instead of text emails. These are nearly impossible to classify since there is no automatic way of scanning an image for it's content. Spammers know this, so they have started to compose their junk messages entirely of images. We are working on ways to combat that but for now, it does result in an increase in junk email.

There is a second reason why spammers are now using images in their emails. When you open (or preview) the email message with it's images, it instantly tells the spammer that you have, in fact, read their email they sent you. (Outlook's message Preview feature is enough to send this information! You can turn the Preview feature off, fortunately, to prevent this from happening.) The spammers will then resell your email address to other spammers. This results in, you guessed it -- more junk email. For more information on images in emails, read the next question below.

If you log into your RTC Webmail account at http://rtccom.net/webmail you will be able to see how many junk emails have been trapped by our spamhunter system.

In other words, the system is still working, and working pretty well but spammers are coming up with new tactics that we have to combat to improve efficiency.

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This question pertains only to our RTC Webmail program. Why are pictures in my HTML e-mails replaced with ugly warning signs? "This image has been removed for security reasons."

There are two kinds of images that come with your HTML e-mail: the ones that come attached with the e-mail itself, and others that link to remote sites. Images that are linked to remote sites are considered "unsafe" for the following reasons:


• Spammers can abuse this to validate your e-mail address
• The sender can know instantly if you have read their e-mail or not (privacy concern)
• Finding out information about your browser, operating system, and your mailserver (security concern).
Let's look at these issues in more detail:


Validating your e-mail address

Spammers can (and do) include specially-crafted image tags that include a "bug" used to validate that your e-mail address is a live one and that you actually read e-mail sent to this address. When such an image is loaded, a request is sent to the spammer's server and it notes in its database of e-mail addresses that you have, in fact, received and read the spam e-mail they sent. Such addresses are re-sold to other spammers and the amount of spam you will receive is going to grow exponentially.


Verifying that you have read your e-mail

This issue is a privacy concern -- if there are images in the e-mail that link to the sender's website, they will know instantly when you have opened and read the e-mail they sent. This can be used against you if for some reason you decide to deny ever receiving that e-mail from the sender -- they will have proof that you have received, opened, and read that e-mail.


Finding out information about you

Every time an image is loaded off the remote server, it leaves a "log" message about what type of system you are using, including the version of your browser, your internet IP address, as well as information about your mail server and the software running on it. This information can be used to carry out attacks on your computer or the server where RTC Webmail runs.


Malicious tags

Images in email can also be used to auto-execute cross-site scripting code in a attempt to trick your browser into revealing your account information to crackers with malicious intent.


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