How do I manage spam in the Spam Management tool?

Environment:

Spam management

Process:

The spam management tool has three functions:

• Review Spam Emails
• Manage Safelist
• Manage Blocklist

From a search you can deliver or delete a message which has been flagged as spam and contained in the quarantine. The safelist allows messages that would normally be flagged as spam to be delivered to your mailbox. Note that a message delivered from safelist entry will still be scanned for malware. Blocklist prevents messages from being delivered to your mailbox.

Select the box next to "Send me a daily digest of received spam emails" if you'd like a daily notification of messages flagged as spam.

Also, note that there is no configuration for spam confidence levels and our vendor releases no information about scoring of emails for spam or malware.

Review Spam Emails

Suspected spam messages are stored in the quarantine for 14 days. To search the emails which have been identified as spam, enter the sender address or domain in the search field, select a date range by specifying a Start Date and a To Date, select a site and a mailbox, and click Search. Messages matching your search criteria are displayed below the Search section of the page. For each message, you will have 4 options: 

1. Release
2. Release and add Sender to the Safelist
3. Delete and add Sender to the Blocklist
4. Delete

If you have a very large collection of messages in the spam quarantine, and if your search terms are not narrowly defined, your query may take a very long time to return information, or it may time out.

You will be prompted to confirm whether you want to resubmit your search. Please note that having multiple large searches running simultaneously can impact performance.

Releasing, Deleting Spam Emails

Click the checkbox in the heading row to automatically select all messages currently displayed on the page.

To release a message for delivery, click the checkbox next to the message or messages that you want to release and then select the circled checkmark icon (shown above far left).

If you would like to prevent this sender's emails from being flagged as spam in the future, you can choose the second to left icon which will release the message and add the sender to the Safelist. This icon appears as a person with a checkmark beside them.

Released messages proceed directly to the destination queue, skipping any further processing in the spam management tool.  Note that techmail still may filter the message based on product configuration or mailbox settings.

If you would like to blocklist this email sender in the future, you can choose the third icon which will delete the message and add the sender to the Blocklist. This icon appears as a person which a line drawn diagonally.

To delete specific messages, click the checkbox next the the email and select the garbage icon (shown above far right). 

If you wish to submit the email as incorrectly marked as spam after an incident has been created you can submit a report.  Please refer to Reporting spam or malware in incidents created by email

Adding entries to the Safelist or Blocklist

Blocklists are useful if you are getting multiple spam messages from the same address or if you are in a loop with one email address. Most commonly email addresses are not used multiple times in spam attacks therefore adding the individual addresses is of little utility.

Safelists are useful if one of your customers simply uses spammy email practices such as writing in all caps or has a poor reputation based on business. If you are a B2C Service customer then adding a safelist entry for your customers domain is useful.  Note that safelists will not prevent emails and attachments from being tested for malware.

Use the Manage Safelist and Manage Blocklist buttons to add senders to the safelist or the blocklist. To add a Safelist or Blocklist entry, select your site from the pull down menu and click the Add to List button. Here you can specify which mailbox to add the safelist entry for. Entries can be also be added to each of the mailboxes by using the "All Mailboxes" dropdown.  Changes to Safelists or Blocklists may take up to two hours to become effective.

Note that email addressed to @custhelp.com will travel through our FT datacenter.  Therefore an entry is automatically added on that datacenter's spam quarantine blocklist for each that you add on your datacenter.

Up to 500 entries separated by a comma, semicolon, or line break can be added in the following formats:

• user@domain.com
• server.domain.com
• domain.com
• [1.2.3.4]
• user@[1.2.3.4]
• [ipv6:2001:420:80:1::5]
• user@[ipv6:2001:420:80:1::5]

Note that spammers may use overly complex and sometimes illegal email addresses.

Click the Save button to save your changes.

Click here for a video demo of the new Spam Management Tool.