Spam Options

Check Filter for Spam if you want inbound email filtered for spam.

There must be at least one spam rule defined. By default two rules are set up:

  1. Quarantine all email with a spam score greater than 6.
  2. Discard any email with a spam score greater than 15.

You can define multiple rules for different spam thresholds and associate actions with each of these. For example, you can create a rule that forces all email with a spam score greater than 6.0 to be forwarded to an administrator, all email with a score greater than 7.0 to be quarantined, and all email with a score over 10.0 to be discarded.

Lower values detect more spam at the risk of false positives - email wrongly detected as spam. Higher values reduce the risk of false positives but could miss some spam. Forcepoint Email Security Cloud aims to ensure that no false positives occur with spam scores over 6.0. This is the recommended default setting for quarantining email.

To define spam rules:

  1. From the first Spam scoring more than drop-down list, select a spam threshold.
  2. From the second Spam scoring more than drop-down list, select an action for that threshold.

    The following actions are available:

    Action Description
    Quarantine-Notify Messages are quarantined as above and a notification is sent to an email address. This is not recommended, because you are simply replacing one email with another. It is included for those that wish to use notifications during an evaluation phase rather than the more widely used “tag” option.
    Quarantine Messages are kept in quarantine for up to 30 days. This is the normal setting used for messages identified as spam. Note that no notifications are sent for this action.
    Forward Messages are forwarded to one or more email addresses in a comma- separated list. You can use this setting to forward all spam to a single account for management purposes.
    Tag subject Message subjects are tagged with a prefix that you’ve assigned (in the Tag subject prefix box under Existing Rules).
    Bounce Messages are bounced back to the sender.
    Discard Messages are discarded. This is often used to discard messages with a very high spam score.
  3. Click Add Rule>> to create a rule based on these parameters.

    Depending on the action you select, you may be prompted for additional information first, such as the email address to which to forward the message.

A list of existing rules is displayed. You can also delete rules here.