SSVT maintains an email filtering service to help keep your inbox free of junk. You may be surprised to learn that each day there are approximately 6500 email messages destined for ssvotech.org email addresses. Of those 6500 messages, about 80% are tagged as “bad” (either spam, containing a virus, or in violation of our acceptable use policy) and are sent to a quarantine folder before they ever reach your inbox. According to the reports, 99.4% of the time the quarantine correctly identifies these “bad” messages. What happens the other .6% of the time?
Let’s say you were expecting an email from a vendor but it never arrives. The vendor insists they sent it. There is a chance that the message was part of the unfortunate .6% incorrectly identified as spam. In order to locate the message you’ll need to do the following:
1. Check your email for a “quarantine summary” message. The sender will be “South Shore Regional School District”
2. Open the message and scan through the list. This is a list of all your messages that were caught by the spam filter. If the message you’re looking for is in the quarantine you will see it in the list.
3. To release the message from quarantine click the “deliver” link to the right of the message. This will cause the spam filter to forward the message on to your inbox.
Hmmm... I hit “deliver” on the quarantine list but I still don’t see the email in my inbox. What happened?
Because email spam and viruses are so rampant there is a second set of filters your message has to go through before you get it. Sometimes a message you release from the SSVT quarantine will be identified as spam by this second filter and it will not be delivered to your inbox. If this happens the message will go to a special folder in your inbox named “spam”. To find this folder, go to the left-hand side of your gmail screen, click “more” at the bottom of your folder list and find the folder named “spam”. Clicking that folder will show you its contents and you should then be able to find the elusive email message you’ve been looking for! Click the box to the left of the message and then click the button that says, “not spam” at the top of your message list. This will tell google that this is a good message and make it so that messages from that sender will no longer be banished to the spam folder.
I hope this tech tip helped you to understand the email filtering process employed by SSVT. As always, if you have any questions do not hesitate to ask!
