Lake Martin Internet, Inc. is proud to provide powerful mail filtering abilities to our users.   This document will help you use these features.  Mail filtering is the ability to process email based on a number of criteria.  You can send email to separate folders for review, automatically send an email in response to one received, automatically forward a received email, or simply reject the email with an error sent to the sender.  Because these features are very flexible, this document is fairly lengthy, but is divided into sections for easy reference.

Enable Mail Filtering

The mail filtering features are optional and need to be turned on so that you can take advantage of them.  To have spam filtering activated on your account, contact the office to make your request or send an email to jamie@lakemartin.net to request in writing.  If you have been a Lake Martin customer before December 2006, Spam filtering is enabled on your account already. 

Setting up a Typical SPAM Filter

Now that you have the mail filter enabled, you can setup rules to sort, delete, or forward the mail.  First, you need to log in to the web mail.  To do this, go to http://mail.lakemartin.net and enter your email address and password in the blanks provided and hit the Login button.  At the top of the page, you will see a link called “Edit Mail Filters”. Click this link to take you to the page where you can begin entering new rules.  The most typical rule is going to be to delete or move spam.  Here is an example of how to setup a rule to automatically delete spam:
First, give your rule a name. Let’s use “spam rule” for now.  Put “spam rule” in the blank labeled Rule Name.  Next, we need to give the filter a condition to match to.  Our email system puts *****SPAM***** on the subject line of messages that it thinks are spam.  To automatically delete those messages, put a dot next to Header. Then, in the blank next to Header, put the word Subject.  This indicates that we are working with the Subject line of the message.  Leave “Starts with” in the pull down menu, and in the blank next to it put *****SPAM*****.  This tells the system that we want to work with messages that have *****SPAM***** on the subject line.  In the next section, put a dot next to Save in: and in the pull down box, choose Trash. At the bottom of the screen, hit the Submit button, and then, click the “Save all changes” button toward the top of the screen.  This “Save all changes” button only has to be hit once after you have finished all of your rules, but in this case, we are going to stop with this single rule.  The items placed in Trash will stay there for 30 days by default, so you can periodically check the web interface’s Trash folder for false positives if you wish.

Dealing with False Positives

No system is perfect for detecting spam, and ours is no different.  Occasionally, we have what is called a “false positive”.  A false positive happens when the system thinks an email is spam and marks it as such, but it is actually NOT spam.  Because our system is so aggressive at trying to catch all spam, this is not unusual.  It usually happens if the sender is using an ISP that condones spam or if they use fancy backgrounds or graphics in their emails.  If you have a person that sends to you regularly and it is getting tagged as spam, you can put in a new rule that will cause the system to NOT delete that user’s email.  First, go to the mail filtering section of the web-mail as above.  Then, create a name for the rule (for example, exception1). Then, make sure there is a dot next to “Header”, and in the pull down box it has “contains”.  In the blank next to the pull down box, put the address of the person that is getting tagged incorrectly.  In the next section, put a dot next to “Save In” and make sure that “Inbox” is in the pull down menu.  Hit the Submit.  Now, at the top of the screen, click on “exception1” (or whatever you named the rule) and click the Up button to bring it to the top.  When it is at the top, click the “Save all changes” button.  Rules are evaluated from top to bottom, so we want to make sure that it gets delivered to the INBOX before it gets deleted.  Since we did not check the “Continue Filtering” box, once the system matches a rule it will stop trying to match other rules.  If you have a rule called SPAM already, move it to the bottom of the list and make sure the false positive rule you entered has a check in the box "continue filtering".  You must do this for each false positive rule you create and ensure the SPAM rule is at the bottom.  The SPAM rule should not have a "continue" filtering option enabled.

Remember - if you have questions, call the office:  256-825-7031