Adroit's server-side spam filter will filter e-mail and detect spam before it even gets delivered to your mailbox.

The Adroit spam filter is based on a Bayesian Statistical filtering algorithm developed by Paul Graham. The filter identifies spam by doing a statistical analysis of the entire e-mail including its headers and message body, and compares the result to know sets of legitimate e-mail and spam.

This method is fair more reliable that simply trying to detect certain words or phrases or 'from' e-mail addresses in messages to identify them as spam, and generally produces zero false-positives (declaring a legitimate message as spam). See Paul Graham's detailed description for more information.

To use the Adroit spam filter, you must first be using the IMAP protocol to read your e-mail, then you must setup 3 new mail folders on the server:

1. spam-bogofilter
2. spam-isspam
3. spam-notspam

The spam-bogofilter folder is where our spam filter will place all e-mail deemed to be spam, rather than delivering it to your inbox. You should check this folder periodically and make sure that no legitimate messages have been placed there in error. You should delete all messages in the spam-bogofilter folder once you have checked them.

In the extremely unlikely occurrence that you find a legitimate message, move it to the spam-notspam folder. Each night, any messages moved to the spam-notspam folder will be used to update your spam filter database so that the filter learns that in future, messages like these shouldn't be declared as spam.

Likewise, if any spam is delivered to your inbox in error, move them to the spam-isspam folder. Each night, any messages in the spam-isspam folder will be used to update your spam filter database so that the filter learns that messages like these should be declared spam in future.

From our own experience with this service, only about 1-5% of spam actually make it through to the inbox. However the more you update your spam list, the less chance there will be of getting that spam again.

The Adroit 'Spam Filter' (including one Adroit email account) costs $66 per year. Refer to the Web & Domain Hosting Services page for more information and service agreement.