The Shastalink Barracuda Spam Filter How to properly use the Barracuda Spam Filter to control your Inbox

How does the spam filter work? The Barracuda Spam Filter reads every sent to you and determines whether the message is legitimate, questionable, or definitely junk mail. Legitimate mail goes right into your inbox. Known junk mail is just dropped, it never gets to your inbox. Questionable mail gets put into your personal quarantine folder located on the Barracuda and remains there for 30 days or until you deal with it. How you deal with your quarantine mail determines how effective the filtering works for you. It is up to you to tell the Barracuda that the mail in your quarantine folder is legitimate or not, that’s how the system learns about your mail.

So, what do I do? Do not delete this message! Instead, open the message and do this…..

Your message will look similar to this one. It’s tempting to click delete here, but that only deletes this mail from the quarantine folder, it does not tell the filter that this is spam, so……scroll down and click the link that says click here.

Now you can see that more options are available to you, specifically a button that says Classify as Spam. Very rarely will you find a legitimate message in your quarantine folder, but it’s good to glance at the items there to be sure.

By using the select all feature you can deal with all of the messages in your folder at once.

After you select all of the messages that are spam, click the Classify as Spam button, after a few seconds your screen will look like this….

Two more clicks and you’re done….. Close the current window by clicking the red X in the top right hand corner. You will now be back to the original message from the Shastalink Spam Filter, you can delete this message because you are done with it. Now you’re back to your Inbox. After you perform this procedure a few times you will realize that it is only a few mouse clicks and goes very quickly. The best part is that after doing this for 3-4 weeks you will see a drastic reduction in the amount of spam mail that gets through to your Inbox.

As always, call if you have any questions. By the way, the procedure outlined here works exactly the same in Outlook, in Outlook Web Mail or with any other client software you may be using.