Reporting Spam

You can help in the fight against spam! Report it to your anti-spam provider. We rely on your feedback. At PerfectMail we offer several ways to report spam so that reporting can have an immediate impact on your local spam server and assist in our development activities. A steady stream of spam feedback helps us to develop new tests and gives us a feel of what is actually getting past our filters in the real world.

Forward your spam!

The simplest way to report spam is to forward your spam messages to spam@perfectmail.com. Our preference is to forward the messages rather than including them as attachments, but both ways will work.

Report Message as Spam using the User Interface

The best way to report spam is using the web-based user interface. The Mail Log lets you select messages using check boxes to report them as spam. Some administrators review their messages on a daily basis and report spam messages as they find them. For end-users an E-mail Activity Report and Self Service Console are also available so they can select and report spam without having to rely on their e-mail administrator.

What happens to the spam I report?

When you report spam, either by forwarding the message to spam@perfectmail.com or by using the web-based user interface, a copy of the spam message is sent to your PerfectMail server.

The server watches for messages being sent to spam@perfectmail.com and harvests information from those messages. It can also see who forwarded the spam message, so it can tell where the original spam message came from and who reported it as spam. Sometimes it's hard for the server to decode that information, so the best way to report spam is to use the Administrator Interface or Self-Service Console.

Your PerfectMail server uses the spam messages you report to train various dynamic filters. It analyzes the spam message for words and phrases and even the message structure. It also marks unwanted e-mail senders in this process, to reduce unwanted content. When a normal user reports a message as spam the server marks that e-mail sender as 'unwanted' for them personally. If an administrator reports a message as spam the server marks that e-mail sender as 'unwanted' for everyone on the server. Your personal preferences have an impact. Similarly, when an e-mail is released from the local quarantine the sender is marked as 'wanted'. Your server watches your 'wanted' and 'unwanted' senders to make decisions on how to treat e-mail senders.

Next a copy of your reported spam message is sent to our spam clearing house at spam@perfectmail.com. We gather spam here for further analysis and filter training. We also use this for developing new tests and strategies.

The best way to report spam is by using the User Interface. When you do that we can gather more information about the path each spam message took and make better decisions.