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SkyCon can protect your current e-mail from viruses and SPAM even if you are not currently a SkyCon customer! Contact Us for details.

What is spam?
Spam is unsolicited commercial email, or junk email. For a good description of spam and the problems it causes see www.cauce.org

Tips on avoiding spam
1. Guard your email address. Do not give out your email address to people you don't know, and don't give it out to businesses. If you have to give an email address to register a product or make an online purchase, create an email account just for this purpose. Free Hotmail or Yahoo accounts work well for this purpose. If you post to Usenet newsgroups, set up a mail account just for that purpose.
2. Do not reply to spam. Most of the time the from address in a spam message is false, so replying will only get you an "Unable to Deliver" message, but occasionally you will be able to get back to the person that actually sent the message. However, this just confirms to them that someone is actually reading mail sent there. End result: more spam.
3. Do not use the remove links in the spam message. Most of the time, remove links just serve to confirm your email address to the spammer, if they do anything at all.

Links about spam and how to fight it:
The spam FAQ
The Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email
Spamcop
SpamCon Foundation Law Center
Spamlaws.com

What does SkyCon do to protect its users from spam?
We have spent a great deal of time coming up with a system that protects our users from having to deal with the spam epidemic. Unfortunately, there is not any method available that can protect against every piece of spam that is delivered to our mailservers without being too restrictive to the end user. The system that we use is made up of a testing algorithm that every piece of mail goes through. Once the message has been tested, it is given a score based on different aspects of the email message and its headers such as all capital letters, certain key words in the subject line, excessive exclamation and question marks, numbers after the main subject, pornographic content, mail to links, etc. No one aspect will mark the message as spam, but if a message contains a number of these qualities then its score is raised higher and higher. Once the score is above a certain level our mailserver will tag the message as spam and change the subject line by adding the tag *****SPAM***** in the subject line.

Why doesn't SkyCon just delete all the spam?
Well we could, but no test is perfect and there is always a chance of false positives. We wouldn't want to delete a message that may be very important for one of our users. This is the reason we chose to make the potential pieces of spam easier to identify. We recommend every one of our users set up a folder in their mail reader of choice for spam and create a filter on the subject line of "*****SPAM*****" that moves incoming spam tagged messages to that folder. Before you delete it, quickly double check to make sure that there isn't anything in the folder that may have been mistakenly tagged as spam. If you find something tagged as spam that should not have been, be sure to contact us and we will be more than willing to help solve the problem. If you decide that you would rather have all your spam deleted at the server before it gets to you, let us know and we can set that up for you.

Setting up SkyCon Spam Filter in Mozilla

With your Mozilla mail client open click on Tools -> Message Filters Click New

Enter Filter Name SPAM

Set the rule For incoming messages that match any of the following

Subject Contains *****SPAM*****

Check Move to folder and select the folder you want to put SPAM in (probably Trash)

You can also make a new directory called SPAM to put the SPAM in so you can review it later in the event the mail is mistakenly identified as SPAM.

Setting up SkyCon Spam Filter in Outlook Express

To set up message rules, click on Tools, Message Rules, then Mail on the menu bar, then click on the New button. This will bring up the New Mail Rule window.

In Box 1, click on the box in front of "Where the subject line contains specific words".

In Box 2, click on the box in front of "Move it to the specified folder".

In Box 3, click on "contains specific words", and type *****SPAM***** in the box that comes up. Click on the Add button, then the OK button. Click on "specified", then click on the New Folder button, and type "Spam" in the box that comes up. Click OK, and OK again.

In Box 4, Type in "Spam", then click on OK at the bottom of the window.