Vanquish adds a Smart Personal Filter

--VQ-- · Site Admin Joined: 06 Jan 2003 Posts: 474

Question: Why is Vanquish using Filters? Isn't vqME Better than Filters?

Answer:
In March 2006, Vanquish added a personal and smart Bayesian filter to a growing armada of email tests. The new filter does two things:

Mail that is very likely desirable gets yet another way to bypass the Held Mail folder without your inspection and intervention. Of course, there are a dozen other ways that vqME recognizes desirable mail and sends it directly to your IN box).
As the filter learns about your preferences and becomes highly accurate, it helps us to avoid challenging addresses that are fraudulently used by spammers. (more about this below)

To our long time users, the addition of a filter must seem like heresy! We have always believed that filters can be too effective at blocking mail. They throw out the baby with the bathwater. If you must always look through your Held Mail for one or two important messages that were mislabeled as spam, then the entire system fails to provide value, because it is only moving the drudgery from your IN box to your Held Mail folder.

Vanquish has designed this filter in a more personal and far more positive way than any competitor. For users who also enable sender confirmation (the "challenge"), our new filter will never block a message (You read this correctly!). The challenge and block list effectively do the blocking. Instead, the filter allows messages. It simply provides yet another way for personally desirable mail to bypass Held Mail - without requiring your precious time or resources.

The feature is even more valuable for users who choose to avoid challenging senders, because it trains itself on every message that passes the other tests, including your Allow List. It even improves itself based on the nature and tone of your own outgoing mail! We are so confident that our new smart personal filter is accurate and personal, that we are considering a default setting of no-challenges for new accounts. That's a bold statement from the company that once used "No Filters" as its mantra. Not long ago, they were the butt of criticism in our comparison tables.

Operation
To enable or disable the filter, click Configure » Preferences. Place a check next to Personal Smart Filter and click Save Changes. If you use our Address Confirmation feature, this new Baysian filter will never block a message. But it gives another method for legitimate mail to avoid your Held Mail folder. For most users, it will let through 3 or 4 additional messages each week that have a high probability of being the very few ones that would have been stuck in Held Mail. Our goal is to make it totally unnecessary for you to view your Held Mail.

How Does it Work?
For those interested in the underlying principal, click here. Complex? Of course. But the complexity is under the covers. Most of our users are satisfied to simply observe that the smart filter is startling in its precision. It is so good, that some users turn off the challenge/confirmation feature. (Vanquish recommends using all features listed on the Preferences page).

Change to Held Mail View
There is a new column in your Held Mail view. The CS column means "Challenge Sent". First let's discuss what it means - and then we shall explore the benefit of sorting it...

With the addition of this new feature, we will be suppressing sender address confirmations when we are certain that the message is clearly a widely distributed piece of spam (that is, if you are have Sender Confirmation enabled). By suppressing a large amount of clear spam, it will keep the IP address of our challenge server off of the block lists to which ISPs subscribe. Spammers intentionally use fake "honeypot" addresses to attract our challenges. This makes it look like our challenge server has harvested these fake addresses from the internet. When we challenge them, it gives our server a bad rap - and then major domains such as Yahoo or AOL stop passing along our challenges.

When you sort the Challenge Sent column, you are placing the less certain spam messages near the top. But the bottom of the list is certainly undesirable mail (unless you need a p*nis enlargement, some fake V!ag1a or a home mortgage that originates in Romania). In the event that you want to release a particular message -- but you don't know when it arrived, this can save a lot of time.

For more details about the CS Column, click here.

Help! My Filter is Delivering Spam
We can help...See this tip.