How to Report False Positive and False Negative messages
Situation – You are receiving clean email being marked as spam or spam email being marked as clean and want to report it to support.
Solution -Report emails to Spambrella Support so that spam definitions can be updated. See below to learn more about False Positives, False Negatives and how to report them.
Ticket Creation
For these processes, we highly recommend providing the details directly in our ticketing system by attachments. Please make sure when submitting, follow these ticketing processes:
- Creating a ticket – email support@spambrella.com
- Updating a ticket – Respond to the email chain so that the ticket number remains in subject line.
False Positive (FP):
This is a message that is not spam but is incorrectly being blocked as spam.
False Positive messages are quarantined. The Support Team will need a copy of the original message in order to request an adjustment to our anti-spam service.
False Negative (FN):
This is a message that is spam but is incorrectly seen as a regular email.
Incoming False negatives are messages that come through our system that passed our anti-spam filtering. This is an annoyance to end-users and should be reported to ensure that the message(s) are not seen again.
Original data needed
An email message reported needs to be the original message that is either being sent or was received. If a message is needed to be looked at for the below, the message cannot be in-line forwarded. If a message is identified as forwarded, we will not be able to process anything for this, as we lose details specific to the original message.
The messages must be in either a .msg or .eml format for Spambrella to properly investigate.
Reporting Instructions:
As the admin, please follow the below instructions:
- Click Logs.
- Search for this message.
- Under Actions, click Detail (FN/View (FP)).
- Copy the permalink at the top. You will need to provide this to support when you report this message.
- Click Report as false-negative OR false-positive.
- Fill out the information on the next page.
- Check the box, allowing Support access to the message.
- Click Report.
If you have multiple, please repeat the above.
Do not use “Classify as…”
In the drop-down, in step 5 we indicate to use the ‘Report as…’. This allows Spambrella support to retrieve the message. If you use the ‘Classify as’ option, it will not allow us to retrieve the message.
Reporting Through Ticket
- Create or update a case through the ticketing system.
- From the previous process, provide the permalink(s) to message(s) being reported.
- Create/Upload the message(s) if being asked for this.
Update Time
Our team that reviews the spam definitions processes these as they come in. It does take time to review all of these. Some are automated, some are manual. With the automation side, it can be a quick small update, or it could be a machine learning process where it has to go through several iterations of training. This processing time can take a couple of days in some cases before an update is available.
However, once a definition is ready, typically the servers all update within an hour after they push the update.
