Knowledgebase & FAQs

How do you decide if something is spam and categorise it?

Our Cloud Screening Platform uses a number of technologies and systems to determine what it considers to be spam. Detecting spam isn't always a completely precise art and you can get incorrect assumptions (known as a "false positive") - and conversely some spam messages might not be detected (known as a false negative").

If our system determines a message is likely to be spam, it categorises the message in one of 4 ways. This allows you to have us handle the types differently (for example you could ask us to deliver one type to you as normal, but refuse others).

The categories are:

"Confirmed Spam"
These messages are very likely to be spam - based on the criteria which includes reviewing the reputation of the sender, previous history of that sender, the ISP, network and servers (sources) of the message, feedback from other customers and overall monitoring globally of the message and it's characteristics.

If you choose any of our options where these messages get delivered, they'll be prefixed "VPW-CS"

"Suspect Spam"
Messages that our system thinks have a good chance of being spam, but isn't sufficiently happy to declare them as "very likely" - they're likely to look quite spam-like (and there's a good chance the source has some credibility issues). These are prefixed with "VPW-SUS"

"Bulk"
Messages that we don't consider to be spam per-se, but are likely to be "bulk" - mailing lists, bulk communications and so on - they're often the mailing lists you have subscribed to. We generally suggest you may not want to block these. They'll be prefixed "VPW-BULK"

"Filtered"
Messages that our engineers have manually decided to filter - usually in response to a specific trend or issue. They'll be prefixed "VPW-FIL"

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