How can I turn OFF spam filters

[BarrieWalker]

I do that pretty much daily and still the majority of what ends up in the Spam folder is not spam.

[azoic]

As has been mentioned several times in this thread, it is neither convenient nor practical to have to go into webmail to set senders as safe. I don't want to use webmail but I have to constantly go into it just to check if there any emails in spam.

As I have mentioned, there is a practical and elegant solution provided by BT but because of a bug it doesn't work. This solution is to set up rules to copy all emails from spam to the inbox. The facility is there and it used to work but now  there is a bug and it doesn't. If this was fixed everybody would be happy and this would not be a recurring complaint. My question is - how can I escalate the problem?

[Leanne_T]

Hi @azoic 

Our BT Email server settings page, advises, for the best experience and your security we recommend you set email clients to use IMAP and SMTP with SSL or TLS enabled. Could you try and using the settings on the help page for one of these options if you don't at the moment, as this may help with the spam filters.

Thanks. 

Leanne.

[str8chat]

@Leanne_T 

I have a problem with IMAP. I do most of my work on a small laptop PC with limited storage. Perhaps once a week, when I am home, I use my desktop PC on which I keep all the emails I wish to save.

If I use IMAP on the laptop, I cannot delete emails I don't want on that PC until I have had a chance to save them on the desktop PC as IMAP keeps clients synchronised with the email server. So I use POP3 on the laptop. If I delete an email in IMAP it goes from the server so I no longer have the option of archiving it on the desktop PC when I get home.

Some emails appear to be detected as spam based on their content or size. I have had several emails from specific senders that have been flagged as spam, while other emails from the same senders arrive in my Inbox.

My option appears to be to log in daily as a webmail user through a browser and check for emails wrongly directed as spam then set that sender as safe. To me it would be much more logical to do this the other way round. Let me decide which emails in my Inbox are spam, and then I can log on to the server and mark those senders as unsafe myself.

Also, I understand the BT block certain types of email without giving the recipient any option to review or even learn that this has happened. I might write to Ofcom and ask them about the legality of BT blocking emails beyond the control of users.

Is there a list of domains or email addresses that BT unilaterally block?

[gg30340]

@str8chat 

Do an Internet search on "How many spam emails are sent each day" and have a read through some of the articles and you might then appreciate why all ISP and Email Service Providers block emails prior to them even getting to your Inbox.

For security reasons I doubt that any ISP or Email Service will furnish you with a list of of the domains or email addresses that are unilaterally blocked.

If an email lands in your Spam box this is because the spam filters are unable to establish for certain that it is spam and such it gets delivered to the spam box so that the recipient can decide if it is spam or not. 

The reason that some senders "genuine" emails get through to your Inbox while some get sent to the spam box is because something in the email's title or contents or one of the many other spam triggers has activated the spam filter but because it is a known or safe sender to the recipient's email account it gets placed in spam rather than just deleted. This allows the recipient to decide. 

You may say that if it is in the safe senders list it should go to the Inbox. In answer to that, it is not unknown for peoples email accounts to be hacked and spammers to use the hacked account or spoof the email address in order to fool the recipient into believing that it is a trusted email and because of this the recipient happily follows the spammers links etc.

Hence it is safer for the spam filter to send it to the recipients spam box so that it alerts the recipient to the possibility that it is not a genuine email.

As regards Ofcom. Good luck with that, as far as I know email is not regulated by Ofcom.

Spam is a world wide problem. If it could be easily solved it would have been by now. The best advice is always be vigilante even with emails that you believe to be from a safe or known sender.

[BarrieWalker]

Okay, perhaps I'm in the wrong thread. I do NOT actually want to turn off the spam filters that save me from having to see the (I accept) vast amount of genuine spam that is being trapped and removed from my Inbox.

What I want is for anything that doesn't meet those stringent criteria to end up in my "Inbox" folder not my "Inbox2" folder which for some reason has been named the "Spam" folder. I want this because the vast amount of email that gets put in it is not spam but genuine, sometimes really imporant, email. Just now there are 3 messages in it, none of them spam, one an order acknowledgement, one from a government office and another from a travel company I have an account with. Yes, all of these could have been spam but they and the vast majority of those that end up in that folder are not.

I can recognise spam pretty well even when they escape and end up in the Inbox folder. Having so many genuine emails end up in the Inbox2, sorry Spam, folder does not make for a safer system.

Surely this is not too much to ask for, even if it's not the default and I have to explicitly change a setting to have it do that.

[licquorice]

There are no settings you can change other than marking the senders as safe senders. You are entirely at the mercy of BTs abysmal spam filters.

[str8chat]

@BarrieWalker 

I feel much the same as you spelled out in your post.

I accept that there are large amounts of spam messages and spam sources, that are of no interest to me, and I never even know of their existence. However, like you, I do get a small number of emails that are wrongly routed into the spam folder when other emails from the same sender are delivered correctly. It is a real pain having to add every new contact to a safe senders list, which I have to do by logging into the webmail service. These messages that are wrongly labelled as spam are what cause me the most problems. I would prefer it if messages the BT's stupid servers could not decide as being spam were delivered normally, and I could log in to the web service and block domains or addresses that are actually spam.

As I get fewer spam messages than genuine good emails, it would be much more efficient if i occasionally had to log in to the webmail to block such spam, rather than having to log in to see what messages had ended up in the spam folder, get them into the server Inbox and mark the sender's credentials as safe. Then my email client can download them for me to archive on my own systems.

This would be a big improvement as far as I am concerned, and BT would not have to store thousands of emails on their servers if I can archive them locally and securely. Since BT axed the BT Cloud service, does this means that BT is running out of storage space. How many GB of email are users allowed to keep on BT's servers. In my case this figure is very low as I have emails going back over 15 years archived in multiple local devices without relying on BT.

Finally, when spam filtering appeared on email services over 20 years ago, it was very easy to set up two rules on an email server:

1. If the subject contains "Rhubarb" put the email in the Inbox.

2. If the subject does not contain "Rhubarb" put the email in the Inbox.

This effectively turned off spam filtering in the server. Then I added rules in my email client:

1. For certain triggers, put the email in the client programs deleted folder.

2. For certain senders (identified from the header information) let the client delete it from the server without deleting the body of the email.

[str8chat]

@BarrieWalker 

Correction: in the last line of my previous post, it should have read "For certain senders (identified from the header information) let the client delete it from the server without downloading the body of the email."

[azoic]

@licquorice 

It's not true that there are no relevant settings for spam emails - as as been stated several times in this thread, you can set up rules to handle them:

• BT allows rules to handle emails.
• One of these rules allows emails to be moved from one folder to another.
• Therefore it is possible to move emails from Spam to Inbox.
• The emails will  then be downloaded to the client automatically and can be handled off line.

I have these rules set up and it has worked perfectly for over 10 years but at some point in 2024 they stopped working.