Is BTInet Really Blocking Spam?

Date Posted: December 01, 2006

Have you ever received Spam (unwanted and sometimes questionable e-mail) in your Inbox and wondered if BTInet was really blocking these types of messages from reaching you? To help answer that question, we thought some of our customers would like to see the stats for the amount of e-mail that BTInet has handled in the last two months.

Stats for November			Stats for December
Quarantined:	364,661		Quarantined:	420,038
Reject Throttle:	25,994		Reject Throttle:	0
Spam:	19,855,561		Spam:	22,666,657
Tagged:	488,761		Tagged:	383,571
Viruses:	30,754		Viruses:	42,084
Allowed:	1,665,631		Allowed:	1,691,471
Bad Recipients:	2,572,565		Bad Recipients:	2,138,400
Total (Excluding Reject Throttle):	24,997,933		Total (Excluding Reject Throttle):	27,342,221

 

Definition of Terms
Quarantined:	Messages that have been held in the BTInet Spam Filter’s Quarantine Inbox because of server-wide rules or because of your personal Spam Filter Quarantine Score.
Reject Throttle:	Connections that have been blocked because the sender attempted to send too many messages within a certain time frame. The amount of e-mail attempts usually indicates a Spammer is bombarding the system.
Spam:	Messages that have been blocked because of their likelihood to be Spam, or because the message contained URLs associated with known Spammers.
Tagged:	Messages that scored high enough to be tagged by your personal Spam Filter Tag Score.
Viruses:	Messages blocked because it contained a known virus, or known phishing content.
Allowed:	Messages that have passed all Spam and virus checks and are considered to be legitimate e-mail.
Bad Recipients:	Messages blocked because the e-mail address specified does not exist.

While we strive to limit as accurately as possible the amount of verified Spam that reaches you, we can not guarantee to block everything. What one individual may see as Spam may be seen as a legitimate e-mail by another user. For this reason, while rare, it is possible that a legitimate e-mail may be mistakenly blocked as Spam. If this happens, you may want to Whitelist the sender of the e-mail message so that future e-mails from them are not blocked as Spam.

If you are still seeing a lot of Spam in your Inbox, you may want to take a look at the “How to Report Spam” article in Subscriber News.

We hope this information proves beneficial to your understanding of how hard we are working to limit the amount of Spam that reaches you. We will continue to look at new technologies and procedures to control the amount of Spam you receive as well as to provide the best level of Internet service possible.