Anti-spam - Settings

Manage these settings from: ☰ Menu ▸ Settings ▸ Components ▸ Anti-spam ▸ Customize

The Main settings screen enables you to customize how Anti-spam filters spam emails and updates the spam filtering rules. After making any changes, click OK to save Anti-spam settings.

Note: Anti-spam is only available as an additional installable component in Avast Ultimate, Avast Premier and Avast Internet Security.

Manage Anti-spam settings

The following settings apply to all email clients:

  • Sensitivity: use the orange bars to indicate how carefully you want Anti-spam to analyze your incoming emails for potential spam. The default setting is Medium (two bars). With higher sensitivity, the component is more likely to detect unwanted emails, but also more likely to mark legitimate messages as spam.
  • Mark in subject of spam messages: marks junk emails with the subject line *** SPAM ***, or modify the text as preferred. This option is ticked by default.
  • Mark in subject of phishing messages: marks scam emails with the subject line *** PHISHING ***, or modify the text as preferred. This option is ticked by default.
  • Add recipients of outbound emails to whitelist automatically: adds email addresses that you contact to a list of trusted emails (known as a whitelist) so that replies from these email addresses are not treated as spam.
    • Add only domains of the recipient: tick to automatically 'whitelist' the domains of your email recipients, rather than their individual email addresses. For example, if you send an email to someone@company.com when this option is ticked, the entire company.com domain is whitelisted.
  • Retrieve new rules: continuously updates the Anti-spam detection filter with the latest criteria for identifying spam. By default, Anti-spam checks for new rules every 300 seconds (five minutes).
  • Enable LiveFeed: configures Anti-spam to check all incoming emails against an online database of global spam messages before executing other checks. The amount of transferred data is small, so we recommended you keep this service enabled.

Manage MS Outlook Anti-spam settings

Manage the following settings if you use Microsoft Outlook as your email client:

  • Automatically move spam messages to the junk folder: sends all spam emails directly to your junk folder. New messages that are identified as spam or phishing emails do not appear in your inbox. This option is ticked by default.
  • Add entries from address book to whitelist automatically: adds all contacts from your Outlook address book to your Anti-spam whitelist, which is a list of known and trusted email addresses. Messages from whitelisted email addresses are never treated as spam.
  • Send samples of incorrectly marked e-mails: occasionally Anti-spam may misjudge messages, for example, when a legitimate email is incorrectly marked as spam (false positive spam), or a spam message is not marked as spam when it should be (missed spam). This setting determines whether samples of these messages are sent to us for further analysis. Select from the following options for false positive spam and missed spam:
    • Ask (default): to decide on a case-by-case basis.
    • Yes: to send samples.
    • No: to never send samples.

Other Anti-spam settings

Use the tabs on the left-side of the window to manage different aspects of Anti-spam behavior.

Manage Whitelist

The Whitelist allows you to manage a list of senders whose emails are never treated as spam and are always delivered as normal.

  • To add a single email address, click Add, then provide the specific email address. For example, someone@company.com.
  • To add an entire domain, click Add, then provide the domain name only. For example, company.com.

To add another email address or domain to the whitelist, click Add. To remove an email address or domain from the whitelist, click the relevant row, then click Remove.

Individual email addresses take priority over entire domains. For example, if the domain company.com is on your whitelist but the individual email address someone@company.com is on your blacklist, emails from this sender are blocked.

Note: Wildcard characters (for example, * and ?) are not supported.

Manage Blacklist

The Blacklist allows you to manage a list of senders whose emails are always treated as spam.

  • To block a single email address, click Add, then provide the specific email address. For example, someone@company.com.
  • To block an entire domain, click Add, then provide the domain name only. For example, company.com.

To add another email address or domain to the blacklist, click Add. To remove an email address or domain from the blacklist, click the relevant row, then click Remove.

Individual email addresses take priority over entire domains. For example, if the domain company.com is on your blacklist but the individual email address someone@company.com is on your whitelist, emails from this sender are delivered normally.

Note: Wildcard characters (for example, * and ?) are not supported.