Knowledgebase & FAQs

I'm receiving lots of messages from mailing lists, why aren't these being stopped as Spam?

The role of the Anti-Spam service is to stop genuine spam - that is unsolicited messages sent to your e-mail address. Sometimes it can be confusing what is actually "spam" and what is not.

It is a common misconception to think of some types of e-mail as "spam" which are not - for example if you have signed up to a mailing list for a company you've previously purchased something from, then messages from them are not spam.

As one example, if you setup an Amazon account to purchase books, you'll likely have opted in to receive communications from them in future promoting new items they're selling etc. Our system wouldn't think of those messages as spam, even though a few months after you start receiving them you might simply because you receive lots of them.

Those are perfectly legitimate messages - if you don't want to receive them, rather than delete them, or report them to us as spam, you need to unsubscribe from those. Most legitimate mailing lists should have an unsubscrive link. You'll also often find if you log in to that companies web site they'll have options to unsubscribe.

When you sign up to anything online, you should carefully check as most companies ask you to opt-in, or sometimes default to opting you in to receive further communications - much like traditional paper based things would opt you in to receive marketing materials by post/phone in the future. This is the easiest way to manage the amount of unwanted (but not genuinely spam) e-mail you receive.

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