Automatic Spam Deletion

Spam (or electronic b*ll*cks to quote one customer) is a substantial irritant to both our customers and ourselves. On average, about 50% of the messages our receive each day are categorised as being spam. A substantial proportion of these messages are intercepted and deleted before they reach individual mailboxes. Messages that don't meet the deletion criteria are automatically placed with the SPAM folder in each mailbox as the odd one or two may be legitimate.

Over time, individual spam folders can grow to contain hundreds or thousands of messages. As the size of the spam folder does count towards overall mailbox size usage, there have been a few instances where a large spam folder has consumed an entire mailbox's quota. Once this quota limit is reached, no new messages can be sent or received by the mailbox until some messages are deleted.

To counter this, as of 12th October we've instituted a new policy whereby we will automatically delete all spam messages that are older than 28 days. To avoid any valid messages being lost, we advise all customers to check the contents of their spam folder at least once a week and move any false-positives (valid messages categorized as spam) to another folder within their mailbox.

We're starting with 28 days, but we are looking at reducing this period down to 21 or even 14 days based upon customer feedback. The deletion occurs on our server, so you may not see messages being removed from spam folders until your account next synchronises with our servers.