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Please read the following document concerning our new mail filtering device, MessageScreen. Once you have completed the document, use the following quick links for future reference.
What does MessageScreen do?
Prior to June 2003,
probably 90% of our support calls had been
concerning customers questioning why they were receiving so much
unsolicited email, or spam. MessageScreen is our answer to this annoying and costly problem.
MessageScreen is a tool that will filter out unwanted email and check for
viruses.
How does it work?
MessageScreen uses a list of rules to
score email messages. The higher the score, the more likely it is
unsolicited, contains explicit content, or has potentially harmful
attachments or code, and should be quarantined. When a message is
quarantined, it is placed in a special holding place.
Scoring Example
In the example shown below, various parts of the email are analyzed and assigned a total score. Since the score is over the UCE/spam quarantine threshold of 200 points, it will be sent to Quarantine.
By placing messages in a quarantine, you can browse through the possible spam and ensure that any legitimate email is not lost. There are even a few settings you can change that will override the server-wide filter, such as disabling filtering, maintaining a trusted senders list and maintaining a blocked senders list. If email from a valid sender is quarantined, you can add that sender to your trusted senders list which will bypass all other filtering for that sender, including virus detection, and ensure the delivery of such mail to your mailbox. In addition to a trusted senders list, there is a blocked senders list.
What criteria is Hawk currently using?
You can
view some basic information about how we filter email by visiting
http://www.hawkpci.net/SpamFilter/rulesetinfo.htm.
What do I do with the messages in my
quarantine?
At this time, your quarantine will only hold 7 days worth of email. The quarantine
is your tool. Use it or don’t, the option is yours. Following is a list
of actions you may perform against messages found in your quarantine:
- View
When View is selected, the content of the message or attachment appears in a new View Window. - Forward
When Forward is selected, the message is forwarded to the specified Recipient(s) but remains in the Quarantine. - Release
When a message is Released from the Quarantine, it is delivered to the intended recipient. - Delete
When Delete is selected, the message or attachment is deleted from the Quarantine and is NOT delivered to its intended recipient(s). - Release and Whitelist
When Release and Whitelist is selected, the message will be released, and the Add Trusted Senders screen will appear, where the user can specify what is to be added to the Trusted Sender list.
How do I change filtering options?
The first step to viewing your
quarantined messages and modifying your filtering settings is to log in.
Go to http://messagescreen2.hawkpci.net/user
and enter your email address and password. You can also find this link on
our web site at http://www.hawkpci.net.
Enter your full email address and your password and then click Login. You
will then see a window that looks something like this:
Notice the menu on the left. Click the User Settings link to change your filter options.
From this window, you can disable/enable filtering and change your UCE/Spam and Explicit Content Tolerance. The available tolerance levels are Policy Default, None, Permissive, Moderate, and Strict. None does not mean no tolerance, it means no scoring. Remember, the higher the score, the more likely it is unwanted email. After you change the desired settings, click the Save button. You will then see the following message:
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Sending User Preferences to Server, Please Wait.... |
You can also change your filtering options by adding to your Trusted Senders list and the Blocked Senders list. Using these lists, allow you to by-pass MessageScreen filtering for well known, "friendly" message senders, and to automatically drop messages from message sources that are known for only originating UCE/spam messaging. You can add either an email address, or an entire domain to the list. For example, you can add accounts@hawkpci.net or @hawkpci.net to either list.
What if I’m not receiving trusted email?
The first thing you need to do is check your quarantine for the email. If
you find that “friendly” email is being quarantined, unless it is a
newsletter type publication, forward the
message to webmaster@hawkpci.net or fightspam@hawkpci.net and let us know
in the body of the forward that you would like us to investigate why the
message was quarantined. Once we find the reason, we will notify you of
our findings. We will then adjust the filter settings if we can. If the
anticipated email is not in your quarantine, there are a number of
possibilities. Such possibilities include a busy sending or receiving mail
server, the MessageScreen appliance could be congested, or the sender
could have used the wrong address or mistyped it. Newsletter type
publications will almost always be quarantined or deleted by the filtering
device because of the nature of the message. To the filtering
device, it looks exactly like spam. Only you and the sender know
that you have requested such messages. You should add the domains of
the newsletter senders to your trusted senders list.
Any time you request a new subscription to a newsletter, be sure to add
the newsletter's domain to your trusted senders list.
| Blocked Sender | If there is a particular email address or a whole domain, such as hawkpci.net, from which you do not want to receive email, you can add it to your blocked senders list. When this domain or email address is encountered, the email is automatically sent to the quarantine with no further filtering. |
| Domain | In simple terms, a domain is identification for an entity on a network. For example, hawkpci.net is a domain. |
| Header | The section of an email message that contains information used by the mail servers and mail readers to determine the origination and destination of a message, what attachments are included, what format the message is in, the subject of the message, where replies should be addressed to and more. |
| Quarantine | .A holding area for email the filtering device has determined should be not be delivered. |
| UCE/Spam | Unwanted, unsolicited email; junk email. |
| Whitelist | To whitelist an email message is to add the message’s sender or the sender’s domain to your Trusted Senders list; opposite of blacklisting. |
Don’t see a definition for an unfamiliar term here? Email us at
webmaster@hawkpci.net with the term and any questions you may have about the term and we will respond with an explanation and will consider adding the term to this glossary for future reference.**Virus protection provided by the filtering device should not be used as a replacement for antivirus software you may already have in place. Hawk Internet Services does not administer the filtering device's antivirus detection data file updates and cannot be held responsible for unknowingly allowing new viruses to be delivered to end users.
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Looking for someone on the Net? Need to find a business? Try the links below.
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