By default, the IP address based filters (Country Blocking and Real-Time Blacklists), are enabled for users. These two filters are described below:

The Country Blocking is static. If a sender's email is coming from an IP address in a foreign country that you are subscribed to for the Country Blocking feature, the message will be tagged with "[Foreign Sender]". It doesn't matter whether the message is spam or not. However, if it may be coming from a country that is known for sending a lot of spam. If you only have contacts in the United States, it's possible that these messages are unwanted, but the email did not trigger any of our spam filters. The tag is informational only and it may help you to determine whether to look at the message.

The third party Real-Time Blacklists are maintained by third parties. These blacklists are of IP addresses that were reported to have sent spam to their users. If a sender's email is coming from an IP address on one of the blacklists that you are subscribed to, the message will be tagged with "[Blacklisted Sender]". We don't maintain these blacklists, and you will want to contact the list maintainer in order to determine why one of your senders was listed. The status of an IP address being listed does change, and it doesn't require any changes on your end to get more of your legitimate or spam email tagged by this filter from one day to the next. It just depends on who you receive email from, and whether they're listed in the real-time blacklist that day. Therefore results will vary. It's possible that these messages are unwanted, but the email did not trigger any of our spam filters. The tag is informational only and it may help you to determine whether to look at the message.

Many organizations get listed in a real-time blacklist because a workstation on their network is sending spam. This can be the result of a virus infection, or simply a malicious spamming user, or unsound mailing list policies. Many ISPs such as AOL or Comcast could also have their email servers listed temporarily for the same reason, causing all email from that ISP to be tagged for awhile.

These filters typically will only identify less than 1% of your email. If you don't find these tags useful, you can disable them by unsubscribing from these filters in the SpamStopsHere Control Panel. Note that many anti-spam products only use these types of IP address based filters, and it used to be common to block messages identified by them. Due to their inaccuracy, we don't recommend DELETING or REJECTING messages caught by these filters, so there is no need to QUARANTINE (an Enterprise Edition feature) the messages or whitelist the sender. These types of filters should simply be used to provide additional information about the source of the email message.

If you receive spam to your inbox that contains this tag, please report it to the email address provided to you for reporting spam that was not properly identified.

Please note that our accuracy was rated #1 in the industry by Network Computing magazine without using these IP address based filters.