Spam Filter Improvements

[Jeremy]

For several years, I’ve been dealing with an ever-increasing amount of spam. Over time, I added various filters to battle it, so I wasn’t sure how much spam I was actually receiving anymore, just knowing that there were at least 2+ per day I would be marking spam and multiple weekends per month I would revise filters to catch more.

So, as a test, for a few weeks, I disabled all of my custom filters for battling spam. These screenshots show the result of that (note, the checkmarked/highlighted emails are actual spam, while others are legitimate):

After this, I re-enabled all of my custom filters and it reduced. But something I’ve noticed, is that no matter how many times I would report the same senders as spam, I would continue to receive it. To combat this, I began to make use of the blacklist feature, which has been effective. I continue to receive spam from new senders, until I add it to the blacklist.

Requested Improvements:

(1) As a simple solution to this, could an adjustment be made, so that “report as spam” on either runbox 6 or runbox 7, that the sender is added to the blacklist? This then prevents the user having to open a new tab for the filter and add them there manually, which is a hassle. Likewise, if the user clicks “not spam”, it would be removed from the blacklist if it exists there.

This one additional feature would make using runbox a lot better.

(2) In addition to this, I have noticed that the filter page is rather simplistic in its operation, in that, adding something to the blacklist does require the user to scroll to the bottom of the page to save settings, something that is not entirely intuitive. Could you add a copy of the button to the top for save settings as well?

Regarding the filter page, the POST request seems to submit the entirety of the page form elements, each time, so I suspect eventually you will run out of the size allowance on the server-side? You may have it set so high that it does not matter, but if nothing else, it will take longer and longer for each submission as that blacklist / other filters, grows. I’m sure you know this, so I am just curious, if the page is just legacy and you plan to replace it with an updated one at some point?

I’d like to state that regarding other features, such as the alias allowance, custom domains, and service uptime, I am extremely happy/pleased, but the spam issue is a serious nuisance. Thank you.

[dhoogendoorn]

Hi Jeremy,

I fully agree with your comments/complains about the very poor spamfiltering mechanism currently in use by Runbox. I’ve been told they are working on a new spamfilter but not when it will become available for, at least, customer testing.

There are days I find 20-30 or some days even more spammails in my Inbox so I started to create a lot of filters trying to eliminate those spammails from my Inbox but with little success. I only have a clean inbox again on my Android device once I have started up Thunderbird on my laptop…but it is only by the end of the day that I do this and all the time I have to look at a very “contaminated” Inbox on my Android device. Furthermore, I have also noticed recently there is a substantial delay in delivering emails to my Inbox which causes some login procedures to time out as the delivery of the message with the required security code is taking way too long.

The poor spamfiltering and the delay in delivering emails to my Inbox and the 25% increase for a new subscription made me decide to not renew my subscription and switch to another email provider. (The lightning speed of delivering new emails with this new email provider is refreshing compared to Runbox). My current subscription expires in September 2026 so I have ample time to update all the sites with my new email address. So, after 15 years of using Runbox I’m going to part ways.

The performance of the Runbox system was stellar when I started to use it in 2012 but it seems that Runbox is becoming the victim of its own success.

[Geir]

@Jeremy and @dhoogendoorn,

Thank you for your messages and taking the time to describe the problems you are experiencing, which are frustrating to both our customers and ourselves as Runbox users.

The email delivery and spam issues you are describing are related to each other, and are increasingly complex due to the ever-changing spam patterns and more advanced tools spammers have available (such as AI). We continuously monitor and make improvements to our server infrastructure, and we greatly appreciate feedback that help guide our efforts to improve delivery times and spam filter efficacy.

Thank you as well for the suggestions to improve our spam filtering, the blocklist functionality, and the filtering page in general. We will consider these and other, similar suggestions when we continue working to upgrade the Filter page to Runbox 7.

For some time we have been working to implement a new trainable spam filter provided by the popular SpamAssassin software package to replace our legacy trainable filter that was based on (the now defunct) Dspam. We are now in the final internal testing and adjustment phase of this new filter, and so far the test results are very positive.

We would now like to invite you to our beta test of this new trainable spam filter, and we hope you will join by sending a message containing your Runbox username to Runbox Support.

Regarding our price plans we have had to make currency exchange adjustments to our Euro prices due to the substantial increase in valuation of the Euro compared to the Norwegian Krone (NOK) in relation to our USD prices. These external changes can be unpredictable and despite our attempts to make our pricing fair across the 170+ countries we serve customers in, it is challenging to entirely avoid disadvantages for everyone.

Aside from this adjustment (which is affected by the country provided in your account settings) our company hasn’t increased the prices on our subscriptions, despite inflationary growth that drive up costs. Instead we have recently introduced up to 25% discounts on our 3-year plans for main accounts and sub-accounts.

We highly value your loyalty and hope you will consider staying with Runbox, as we’re just getting started and have many exciting improvements planned for the future.

– Geir