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How the 'Mark as spam' button works in Private Email
This guide describes how the Jellyfish anti-spam system learns when you mark emails as spam in your Private Email Webmail. It may help you better understand how the process works in the background so that you can control your email flow effectively.
Basically, three things happen when you mark an email as spam in your Private Email account:
The email is moved to the Spam folder: The email is immediately moved to your spam folder to keep it separate from your legitimate emails in the Inbox.
The sender of the email is blocked: The system learns that the emails from this sender (mailbox) are unwanted and makes all subsequent emails from the same sender delivered to the Spam folder.
Jellyfish filtration learning: The Spam filtering system learns from this action and analyzes the spam email to identify similar emails in the future. Later, such emails may be automatically filtered into the Spam folder for your particular mailbox.
NOTE: If you reply to any email that was marked as spam, all the subsequent emails are sent to the Inbox and not the Spam folder.
The same scheme applies to all the senders and emails that got into the Spam mailbox, but are legitimate emails and the user marks them as non-spam (ham).
Please note that the system is trained per mailbox, meaning that if some other users mark an email as spam, this won’t affect the preferences of your particular mailbox. This is done specifically to ensure that the preferences of one user don't impact others - even within one domain (i.e. organization, team, etc) - and users can tailor their email flow to their own preferences.
Frequently Asked Questions
Will marking an email as spam prevent similar emails from reaching my Inbox in the future? Yes, by marking emails as spam, you can influence whether similar emails might be delivered in the future. However, this process is not instant and does not guarantee that the next similar email will be delivered to the Spam folder. The more you train the system - the more you increase the chances that similar emails will be delivered to the Spam folder in the future. This is done specifically to ensure that the anti-spam filtration works effectively with new spam patterns or even if spammers use different domains/emails to bypass the filter. At the same time, the sender (mailbox) of the email that you marked as spam, will be blocked instantly and subsequent emails from the same sender will be delivered to the Spam folder.
What should I do if I want an instant block based on the content of the email? If you need to instantly block some subject, IP address, message body, etc you can opt for creating blocklist rules in the Jellyfish admin instead. This will ensure that emails from this sender or with the subject are not delivered to you in the future. You can check this guide to know how this can be done in your Jellyfish admin.
What should I do if I accidentally mark a legitimate message as spam? If some email was mistakenly marked as spam, it’s possible to correct your labels by marking the email as non-spam. The system will re-learn your preferences this way and in its turn will ensure that similar messages are sent to your Inbox in the future.
NOTE: Instead of clicking the ‘Mark as spam/not spam’ button, you can also use the drag-and-drop option. If you’d like to mark an email as spam, move it to the Spam folder and if you’d like to mark an email as not spam, move it from the Spam folder to Inbox (or any other folder except Trash).
What should I do if I receive false-positive or false-negative results? Sometimes, you may face cases when valid messages are incorrectly identified as spam, or vice versa - actual spam messages may be delivered to your Inbox. Here are the tips on how to fix this:
Keep training the system for wanted and unwanted email patterns by using the Mark as (not) spam button or drag-and-drop emails from Inbox to the Spam folder and vice versa. The more the system learns, the more accurately it works for your mailbox.
If you consistently receive legitimate messages from certain contacts that are being marked as spam, create an Acceptlist rule via the Jellyfish interface. This will ensure that future messages from desired contacts bypass the spam filter and are delivered directly to your Inbox.
If you get too many false positives due to incorrect system training, please contact our Support Team via Live Chat or submit a Support Ticket.
NOTE: We recommend that you use the 'Mark as spam' button in Private Email webmail only, to ensure that the Jellyfish system is trained. Clicking the 'Mark as spam' (or similar) button in your email client to mark certain messages as spam doesn't train Jellyfish due to the individual settings of different email clients. However, you can drag and drop messages to the Spam folder in your email client and this will train the Jellyfish system.
