How Mail Messages are Received

1. Outside mail arrives at the mail server.
2. Blackhole Lists – The mail sender is checked against a blackhole list. This is a managed list of known spammers. Any email that is a match on this list is thrown away. With the high volume of spam that we recieve, this is a very large amount of the incoming email.
3. Virus Check – Email is scanned for viruses, any infected mail is tossed.
4. White/black Lists – If the email address of the mail is listed in your blacklist, it is automatically rejected. If it is in your whitelist, it skips the next step, and is delivered to your mailbox.
5. Spam-Assassin Tests – The message is run against a battery of weighted tests. For every test that it fails, an arbitrary value is assigned. These tests, for example are traits that spam messages tend to have, such as mentioning viagra, real-estate offers, or typing in all caps. The more traits that are found, the higher-overall score the message is rated at. If this number is ABOVE your spam-threshold number for the address or domain (set above), the message is rejected. You can press the ‘view spam report’ button above, to get a better idea of what tests a mail message is failing, and what your overall scores tend to be.
6. Finally, if it made it past everything else, the email arrives in your mailbox and awaits your retrieval!