Overview

Emails are blocked because the spam keyword checking filter detects forbidden words inside of legitimate words.

Root Cause

The option to match whole words is off thereby resulting in the Spam Keyword Checker detecting forbidden keywords within legitimate words.

Information

The Spam Keyword Checking filter will by default check for spam keywords even when they are contained within other legitimate words as substrings.

This module can block emails that have specific words in the subject or body. The words found in the subject and the body of an email are compared with the keywords found in the configuration database.

The option to ‘Match whole words only’, when enabled, would only match the keywords to whole words, as opposed to being within other words. For example, if you were blocking the word “Cialis”, and ‘Match whole words only’ was not enabled, it would block the word “Specialist”. Similarly, blocking the word "cum" would result in emails containing the word "Document" getting blocked if the option to  ‘Match whole words only’ is not enabled.

Keyword Checking is NOT case-sensitive. An email will be blocked by the Spam Keyword Checking filter whether a matching word is spelled in upper case or lower case. For example "keyword" will match both "KEYWORD" and "KeyWord".

The Spam Keyword Checking filter provides a configuration option that will prevent the module from looking inside larger words for spam keywords. Follow these steps to prevent this kind of unintended detections where emails are blocked because disallowed keywords were found in a substring of an otherwise legitimate word:

1. Open the GFI MailEssentials Configuration console
2. Expand Anti-Spam > Anti-Spam Filters
3. Go to Spam Keyword Checking and select the Body tab
4. Scroll to the bottom of the page and select the checkbox for "Match whole words only"
   • 
   • Note: This option works for both Body and Subject.
5. Click Apply to save the settings

Related Articles

• Determining why Spam Keyword Checking blocked or allowed a message
• Is Keyword Checking case sensitive?

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