I’m still receiving Spam Messages, what do I do?

Even though you are using our antispam system correctly, it is possible you are still receiving spam. This page explains you the steps to check to determine why you are still receiving the spam message, and how to resolve that issue.

Check whether you have catch all enabled

First check whether you have catch-all enabled. Spammers prefer to randomly generate recipients such asac3ijj@example.com, if your mailserver accepts these connections it will probably be delivered as well. We highly recomment you to disable catch-all and create mailboxes and/or forwarders for email addresses that should exist.

You can test whether you have catch-all enabled by executing the “Check protection status” function in Spampanel

Check whether your MX records are correct

Your MX records should only contain those of the filtering servers, and should in no case contain any other mailservers. 
If you for instance leave in your own mailserver, spammers will attempt to deliver spam directly and thus bypassing the spamfilters.

Analyze the spam email header

The email headers show detailed information about the origin of the message and the various systems it passed. Simply view the email headers in your email client, and look for the line starting with “X-SpamExperts-Class:”.

X-SpamExperts-Class: line missing

If you do not see a line starting with “X-SpamExperts-Class:” this means the spam message has NOT passed our systems, and therefore could not be blocked. There are various reasons why this could have occurred:

• You are not using the Awesome Antispam MX records. Please chec kthe MX records for your domain. It’s important that you only use the Awesome Antispam MX records:
  • mx1.awesomeantispam.com. (priority 10)
  • mx2.awesomeantispam.com. (priority 20)
• Your are using the correct MX records, but they are not (yet) used. After changing the MX records in your DNS, it may take up to 48 hours before this update reaches all DNS servers world-wide. During this period email may still be delivered directly to your mailserver and therefore may not be filtered yet by the Awesome Antispam servers. Spammers often use old DNS information, so for some period you may still receive spam that never was scanned by our servers. 

X-SpamExperts-Class: line says “whitelisted”

If the class says “whitelisted”, this simply means that you have added the sender or recipient email address to the whitelist of your domain. Spammers always fake the sender, and try to use senders that are likely to be put on whitelists by recipients. Therefore it’s important for example never to whitelist your own email address as sender, since spammers will often send you messages that appear to originate from yourself! The whitelists should really only be used to overrule the filtering technologies if they are causing a problem for you. Generally our classifiers will never block your legitimate emails.

X-SpamExperts-Class: line says “ham” or “unsure”

Awesome Antispam combines many different technologies to provide you optimal filtering and protect from so called “false positives”. You never want a legitimate email to be blocked of course. If you’ve received as spam message classified as “ham” or “unsure”, our system was not confident enough to block the message. This can occur for example if the spam message appears to be from a legitimate source.

• Forward domains. If you have multiple domains that act as email forwarder to the domain protected by our spam filter, we will NOT block the spam messages since they originate from a forwarding server. You will need to use our MX records for such domains, and can use our free domain alias functionality to protect your forwarding domains. To check which email address the message was originally directed to, please inspect the “Received:” headers. These will specify what address the message was delivered to.

Still receiving spam?

Of course it is also possible our system simply did not manage to detect the spam message correctly. If this occurs, please report the message to our systems, so we can further improve our filtering technologies! All reported messages are automatically processed centrally.