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This lesson explores one of the hottest topics surrounding email services, spam.

About Spam

Spam is the term widely used for unsolicited email; spam is also referred to as junk mail. Spam is usually sent indiscriminately to thousands of email inboxes. The content of spam varies widely. Some spam comes from legitimate companies advertising products and services by email, while some spam is malicious in nature, containing email viruses, or scams to designed to defraud people or steal personal information. According to some research reports, as much as 95% of e-mail traffic may be spam:

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If you use our Web Mail system (http://mail.hover.com) to check your email then reporting Spam by clicking on the "Spam" button is the most effective way to prevent Spam messages from being sent to you. Doing this reports to the filters and allows them to adjust based on the reports they receive. When you report something as Spam, it reports much more than an address, but the entire header or routing information that came with the e-mail you reported, as well as the content of the e-mail itself which often contains keywords or other criteria that the filters can use to catch even more unwanted mail.

If you do not use Web Mail then reporting spam is a bit more difficult. If you are downloading your email via IMAP we would recommend that you move your spam messages into their own "Missed Spam" folder and go into webmail to report them from time to time. If you are downloading your email via POP we would recommend that you leave a copy of the message on the server and then log into the webmail to report the spam.

Please do not use the Block Sender to stop spam. This does not report the spam to our filtering system and in most cases the spammers are forging the email address they are sending from. The block sender is not an effective way of filtering out true malicious spam and by not reporting the content to us it means it will take longer for the system to stop these messages.

For further assistance with managing spam email, don't hesitate to contact our customer service team.

Reporting spam in Webmail

Once logged into the webmail at http://mail.hover.com, you will see your inbox much like this. The highlighted message is obviously spam.

Make sure that the mail you wish to report as spam is checked and then click on the spam button up in the top row of buttons.

Once reported it will disappear from the Inbox and will be moved to the Spam folder.

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Article Shortcut: http://about.hover.com/learnaboutspam

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