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E-mail system users at FastMail.FM are provided with virus checks of all incoming messages and file attachments. When harmful code of any type is found (viruses, Internet-worms, Trojan horses etc.) you will receive a warning. FastMail.FM's anti-virus reliably fends off most virus attacks. It is able to scan a wide range of archives and compressed files and supports any amount of file attachment levels.
If you receive a virus while scanning is enabled (by checking this checkbox), the mail is discarded, and you will receive a notification that a message to you was discarded, and you will also be told who sent it.
However there is no guarantee that a virus is present; sometimes safe files are marked incorrectly, and sometimes unsafe files are not identified. For this reason we recommend that you take precautions with files received via e-mail - especially messages sent from unfamiliar sources.
When the virus-scanner detects a virus in an email sent to you it will discard the email that contains the virus and send you a notification to let you know who sent you which virus. However, since most viruses send out mails with forged addresses, this information is oftentimes not very useful. By turning this option on you will no longer receive notifications of mails being stopped by the virusscanner.
Unsolicited Commercial Email ("spam", or UCE) can be a major problem making it difficult to sort out your important emails from junk mail. However, spam can often be identified by looking for telltale signs such as mention of pornography, formatting used by certain bulk-email software, and the presence of known spam servers in the headers. By enabling the spam protection option, FastMail.FM automatically searches for these signs and performs various actions depending how 'spammy' the message is.
The following levels are available:
Normal - most users will want this level of protection. It contains a sensible combination of actions that will file probable spam into a folder called 'Junk Mail'. Messages that are just possibly spam are marked with a 'Spam Score' in their subject. A higher score means that the message is more 'spammy'. If email comes from people in your address book, then it will be less likely to be recognised as spam.
Unfortunately, the spam checking takes a significant amount of CPU time to run, so we can only provide this for users who pay a yearly subscription.
When spam protection is enabled, FastMail.FM automatically searches each message for characteristics that are typical of spam and assigns a 'spam score' using the SpamAssassin engine. Research by SpamAssassin shows that 99.5% of messages that score over 5.0 are spam.
The assigned score is placed in the header of incoming emails. FastMail.FM may take some actions based on the value of the spam score, depending on how you have configured the spam protection.
Advanced users can also define additional actions (reject, file, or forward) in the Define Rules screen, by selecting 'Spam Score >=' as the field to Look In, and entering the spam score theshold into the 'For Text Matching' field.
The main types of checks done by SpamAssassin are:
In general, people who you know are less likely to send you spam than anonymous spammers who harvest your email addresses from the web. To allow for this, you can specify special treatment of spam scores for messages that come from people in your Address Book.
You can decide that these messages will always be accepted, in which case the X-Spam-score header will be set to 0, or you can specify a 'bonus' that is subtracted from the spam score of these messages.
This special treatment does not apply for messages that appear to have the sender forged so as to fool address book whitelisting.
Spammers know that you probably don't want to reject mail that you sent, so one technique they sometimes use is to forge the sender addresses so that it looks like you are sending mail to yourself.
In order to correctly detect these messages as spam, the spam protection does not perform Address Book whitelisting if the sender matches one of your Personality addresses.
A side effect is that if you send email to yourself it may be marked as spam.
A workaround to this is to use the secret word on the Define Rules screen. The message will still get assigned an X-Spam-score, and have the subject marked, but it will not be discarded or filed into Junk Mail by the spam protection.
If you select the discard mail checkbox, then messages that have a spam score greater than or equal to the threshold will be silently discarded, via the sieve "discard" command. You won't see them in any of your folders, or in the trash, and the sender will not receive a bounce or reject message.
It is usually wise to set this threshold larger than the spam score on any real message (i.e. not spam) that you have ever received!
If you select the file mail checkbox, then messages that have a spam score greater than or equal to the threshold will be placed in the indicated folder. You can choose whatever folder you like, but it is easier to empty if you file to "Junk Mail".
If you select the change subject checkbox, then messages that have a spam score greater than or equal to the threshold will have their subject modified according to the value you select in the drop down list.
The possible values are:
There is a side effect of selecting subject marking. The threshold that you specify will be used to set the (deprecated) X-Spam header. If you are using X-Spam in the Define Rules screen, or in a custom sieve script, you should be very careful of changing this threshold!
To recreate your 'Junk Mail' folder, just go to 'Options' -> 'Spam/Virus protection' screen, reset your spam setting to 'Basic' and click the 'Save' button. Now you can reset it to the 'Normal' setting, which will automatically create the 'Junk Mail' folder.