Spam filtering hiccup?

[dragonsclaw]

I recently noticed my greymail went from a few to almost 100 daily. One common thing: they all showed attachments.
None were false positives. Outstanding Sonic Team

Of the few that slipped through this month had Trojans that Defender caught.
I don't open things I do not know.. I also look at full headers for anything suspicious (out of character) for those from that I did know.
I also have multiple mailboxes (you get those free with a sonic broadband account). My bank will never send messages to this one

[sfreedkin]

The spam issue has been ongoing for awhile now. I sent Sonic some suggestions, and they recommended I post them here because these forums are read by the tech people responsible for implementing such solutions.

1. Use a better spam filter. One of my email providers, ElectricEmbers.coop, uses the public-domain SpamAssassin, which seems to do a better job of filtering out spam. [I wrote this before learning that Sonic also uses SpamAssassin, but for some reason, it doesn't work nearly as well for Sonic.] It does occasionally tag a legit message as spam — in my case, perhaps three or four a month — but overall, it’s pretty clean, and it doesn’t often let spam through into my in-box.

2. Enable users to tag messages as spam in your Webmail interface to train your spam filter. EE uses the Roundcube interface, again a public-domain system (your Webmail interface looks similar). EE’s Webmail lets me mark a message as spam, and that’s sent to SpamAssassin to help train it. In fact, I’ve been transferring messages that escape your filtering to EE and marking them as spam there to help train SpamAssassin, and similar spam that reaches my EE account doesn’t sneak through. I’ve had my EE e-address for decades now, far longer than I’ve had my Sonic address, and my EE address has been more public; still, EE receives less spam than my Sonic address and rarely lets much slip through.

Since EE is a much smaller outfit than Sonic, yet does a better job screening spam using public-domain systems, I thought I’d suggest them as a good model, or at least a starting point for Sonic to upgrade its spam filtration.