Stopping Spam using the Friends option in the Webmail interface.

What will happen: By following this quick setup tutorial, you will be enabling your email account to challenge senders to reply to their emails for confirmation if their email receives a spam rating. By confirming the emails, you will be ensuring that you are not receiving mail from automated spam programs, emails from virus/worm infected computers that unknowingly send email and spammers that send emails out with fake addresses. Our test accounts were able to reduce spam from around 80 per day to 0 - 2 per day using this technique.

Log in into your mail account via the webmail interface. http://www.iscweb.com/webmail

Click on the options icon on the right hand side of the icon bar.

Click on the link "Advanced" in the right hand column.

Choose the Friends option to access your filter settings.

Click on the last option in this group "Request confirmation if smite score is...". Checking this means that any email that generates a spam rating of 1 or higher will be stored in the pending area and a confirmation request will be sent back to the sender. Any mail not generating a spam rating will be delivered immediately. The lower the number, the more strict the spam matching. 1 is the lowest number and most strict to use (try a setting of '4' for starters, and reduce as needed).

Be aware that any mailing lists or auto generated forms will not reply. You will need to add these to your friends list. You can view messages waiting for confirmation at any time by clicking on the pending button while in the friends area. Here you can push mail through and add the email senders to the friends list. Examples of emails you may need to scan for (evites, airline tickets, amazon.com, cnn breaking news, ....).

You may want to click on the option "Add all outgoing email addresses to list" as well. This will help you build your "Friends" list of accepted senders who do not get filtered by adding anyone you send an email to the list.