The Filter level in Manager lets you reject unwanted email and sort your email in a number of different ways.

Make sure you click [Save settings] if you make any changes to the settings.

Unwanted Email Protection

These settings are found at the top of the Filter page, and protect your account from potentially harmful email and spam.

Scan for viruses

This option will reject email containing harmful content such as computer viruses. Note that you will not be notified of such messages as they will be rejected by the system before they reach your account.

We recommend that especially users running Windows install virus scanning software on their computers as an extra layer of protection.

See also What are computer viruses, and how to avoid them.

Block sender

Block sender lets you add sender addresses and domains from which you never want to receive email. You can also add new entries directly from email you receive, via the Block sender/domain links in the upper right hand corner of received email.

Note:  This function is not an effective tool for blocking spam since most spammers do not use their real addresses in the From field. Consider using the spam filtering options instead.

Note: To Block entire domains use the format @domain.com.

Detect junk mail

The Runbox spam filter catches unsolicited junk email before it reaches your Inbox. It works on all incoming email, and regardless of how you access your email.

We centrally reject some very obvious spam, but there are also other options that are specific to your account; these are detailed below.

There are 3 settings for spam filtering:

1. Yes, save to [folder name]

This option is activated by default, and saves incoming messages that are classified as spam to your Spam folder or another folder of your choice.

Basic spam filtering is powered by SpamAssassin, a rule- and signature-based spam filter that will catch 80-90% of incoming spam. Please note that you should periodically check your spam folder for any misclassified, legitimate messages since no spam filter is 100% reliable.

Users who opt to receive commercial email or mailing list email (including Yahoo Groups subscribers) might want to deactivate the spam filter because it might classify such messages as spam.

2. Use trainable spam-filter

This option, powered by Dspam, activates the “intelligent”, trainable spam filter. The trainable filter analyzes all incoming email statistically to determine what messages are likely to be spam, based on the words and word combinations in messages previously trained. It works in conjunction with the basic spam filtering, and will help keep up to 99% of incoming spam away from your Inbox.

Using your trainable spam filter
When the trainable filter is activated you will see a “Report Spam” button in the Webmail menu, which you can use to train messages as spam and move them to your Spam folder. In your Spam folder you will find a “Not Spam” button, which does the opposite while also whitelisting the sender address.

Note that spam sometimes uses the recipient’s own address or domain as the falsified sender address, so take care not to whitelist your own (main) address.

As you keep correcting your trainable filter by checking messages and clicking the “Report spam” and “Not spam” buttons it will become increasingly better at distinguishing spam from “ham”, much like you would yourself.

Avoid confusing your filter
Spammers are increasingly attempting to confuse intelligent spam filters by sending messages containing random words or excerpts from literary works. These messages aren’t spam in the ordinary sense, and are meant to “poison” your trainable spam filter by cluttering its statistical data. Unwanted messages that contain random words without the usual spam characteristics (advertisements) should just be deleted to avoid confusing your spam filter.

Maintaining your filter
After a while the filter might become too strict, so it’s important that you monitor your Spam folder for messages that have been misclassified. As your filter becomes more accurate and approaches the correct balance between “spam” and “ham”, it may only require sporadic fine-tuning and still catch more than 99% of incoming spam.

Advanced: Reject if possible
When activated, this option causes the system to reject any email presumed to be spam, before it is accepted by our servers. You will never see the email, and it will if possible send a rejection notification to the sender. In some cases rejection will not be technically possible, and the email will instead be filtered to your spam folder.

This function cannot be active while the trainable spam-filter is active, because it would prevent you from seeing false positives to correct the trainable spam filter with.

It is strongly advised that only advanced users use this function. Because of the nature of the feature it is more likely to reject valid messages that were misclassified as spam than it is to reject spam.

Rejecting messages may cause problems with mailinglists such as Yahoo! Groups since it will bounce the message back to the group.

See also What is spam, and how to avoid it? and Advanced Spam Filtering for more information on fighting spam.

Whitelist

The whitelist lets you add addresses and domains from which you always want to receive mail, no matter how high the spam score is. This is useful for regular contacts, as well as for newsletters and other email susceptible to being considered spam. Addresses in Contacts are automatically whitelisted.

The whitelist only applies to the spam filter, and does not have any effect on what is entered in the Block sender list.

Note: To whitelist entire domains use the format @domain.com. For example, adding @runbox.com to the Whitelist will whitelist all runbox.com addresses.

Autoreply

You can set an Autoreply message entering a subject and a message. If the left empty, the subject of the message will be “Re: [original subject]”.

Note that autoreplies:

  • …will only be sent to messages addressed to you personally.
  • …will only be sent once per week to the same address. To reset this recipient list, set Autoreply to Inactive, Save Settings, and re-activate.

Manual filters

Manual filters lets you sort incoming email and is a convenient way to automatically organize your email.

Select what criteria you want incoming email to match, and what action should be taken. You can set up as many filters as you’d like; a new one will appear for each previous one you save.

Your email will “fall” through the filters you have set up, one beneath the other. For each filter some email may be retained, while the rest fall through to the next one, and so on.

You can set up several hundred filters, and a new, empty entry will appear at the bottom of the list every time you save a new filter.

Matching

When setting up a filter, first choose which header field you want to filter by, e.g. the message’s To, From, Subject, or Body field, from the first drop-down menu.

In the next drop-down menu (to the right) you choose whether the given field in your emails should or should not contain the text string which you enter in last the field on the right. Note that this field is not case sensitive.

Action

On the next line, you choose how the email that match your criteria will be handled. Note how the different menu options work, as they affect all subsequent email processing:

  • Saved to folder saves the email in the folder you specify, skipping any other filters and going directly to the Access level.
  • Forwarded to sends a copy of the email to another email address while retaining the original email and allowing it to pass down to other filters and to the Access level.
  • Redirected to sends the original email to another email address and does not allow it to pass down to the next filter or the Access level.
  • Sent as alert to sends a short message with only the sender and subject of the email – convenient for instance if you can receive email messages on your mobile phone.
  • Deleted permanently deletes the email, not allowing it to be accessed at all.

In the last field you enter the email address(es) or folder you want the email meeting your defined criteria sent to. Separate multiple addresses by using a comma or semicolon and a space. You can only specify one folder for each filter. All email that remains after the filtering process will continue down to the Access level and thus be accessible in your Webmail Inbox as well as through other, local email clients.

Active/inactive

Make sure the “Active” option above your filter is selected if you want the filter to be processed.

The “inactive” option is convenient if you want the filter stored but not active.

Order

When creating a new filter, it will appear after any other existing filters you have previously set up and will thus be processed last, unless you enter a number in the “Order” field. You can re-order all your filters by entering a number in their “Order” fields and clicking [Save settings].

Deleting a filter

If you want to delete a filter, check the “Delete” box to the right in the filter before clicking [Save settings].

Note: Make sure that you do not set up filters that forward to your own account, even via domains or aliases you have set up with Runbox. Doing so will create an email loop and effectively stop email delivery to your account altogether.

Examples

To delete all email where the “subject” field contains the word “free”, you would enter:

filter 1

To forward all the remaining email where the “from” field doesn’t contain “work.com” to a family member at “esmith@nullhome.com”:

filter 2

To save all the remaining email where the “to” field contains “jsmith@nullcompany.com” to the folder “Business”:

filter 3

All remaining email will continue down to the Access level, and will be accessible in your Webmail Inbox as well as other email clients.