E Street Spam & Virus Filtering Additional Tips and Details:
Here is some additional information about how to best take advantage of the advanced features in E Street’s spam and virus filtering system.
For the main Intro and Instructions see:
https://estreet.com/knowledge-base/e-street-spam-virus-filter-overview/
E Street Customers are provided Spam and Virus Filtering and protection by our Spam and Virus Firewall. Our Firewall provides a powerful, easy to use solution for eliminating spam and viruses from your inbox and computers. These are essential tools for businesses and individuals who rely on their computers: Some of the protections our firewall provides:
* Anti-spam The algorithms and methods used by the E Street Spam Firewall are the most comprehensive and most advanced in the industry at detecting and filtering spam resulting in the lowest rate of false positives.
* Anti-virus By utilizing dual layer virus blocking, decompression of archives and file type blocking, the anti-virus engine in the E Street Spam Firewall provides complete virus protection.
* Anti-spoofing This technology prevents the use of forged or “spoofed” sender addresses on unsolicited email. The anti-spoofing feature also allows larger organizations to specify a list of IP addresses that are allowed to have a “From” address that appears from inside the organization to support multiple sites and multiple email servers.
* Anti-phishing The E Street Spam Firewall provides robust protection against phishing schemes which are often used to gather confidential information about an organization or it’s individual users.
* Anti-spyware (Attachments) – All attachments are scanned and any spyware executables are detected and eliminated immediately.
* Denial of Service Protection Rate controls are utilized to stop denial of service attacks as well as dictionary based spam attacks. These rate control systems are integrated and automatic in the E Street Spam Firewall.
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As spam comes in that needs to be quarantined, a “Quarantine Report” will be automatically created for your account. The system will create one for each account you have, including Redirects and Aliases. You will be notified when that quarantine is created and you will be given information about how to log in.
You can find info about how to find and change your system generated password here:
https://estreet.com/knowledge-base/accessing-the-e-street-spam-and-virus-firewall/
You can log in to your Quarantine area here:
On the main screen of your quarantine, (the Quarantine Inbox tab), you will see all of your quarantined messages. In there you can perform several types of operations:
1) Clicking anywhere on the message will open a new window so you can view the message.
2) Clicking on the checkbox to the left of the message will select it so you can use the Deliver, Whitelist and Delete buttons at the top of the message list to perform that action on multiple messages at once.
3) To select all messages, click on the checkbox just to the left of the “Time Received” column header. You can then Delete, Whitelist or Deliver all of them. This is most commonly used to Delete all mail in the quarantine.
4) There may be “Classify as Not Spam” and “Classify as Spam” buttons. We recommend that you IGNORE these. They control the underlying “logic” of the system and you can easily damage your filtering accuracy by using them incorrectly. E Street does this kind of message classification for you.
5) Each message has a “Deliver Whitelist Delete” link to the right of it. This is a quick way to perform a single action on a single message. For instance, if a legitimate message was blocked and you want to make sure that sender is never blocked again, just click the Whitelist link. The message will be delivered to you and the sender’s address will be added to a list of addresses that never get filtered.
6) Lastly, there is a Filter at the very top of the quarantine list that will let you search for specific message patterns.
All e-mail is graded on a number scale with “0” having no spam components and “10” being very “spammy”. You can change the way the system scores your e-mail if you like. However, we have set a medium/high level that should be safe for most users.
When you log in to your quarantine area, you will see a “Preferences” tab. If you click on this and then go to the “Spam Settings” tab you will see the area where you can change your scoring.
By default your account will be set up to “Use System Defaults.” If you want want to override those defaults, just click on the “No” radio button and then click on the “Save Changes” button. Remember, you DON’T have to do this if you want to just use the System Default settings. They work very well.
At this point you can manipulate the “Spam Scoring” on the lower half of the screen. Here is how the scoring works:
There are text boxes on the right side of the screen that suggest “recommended” levels. Please IGNORE these. We have pre-set the most appropriate levels for you.
Tag Score: is set at “10 which means it is turned off by default. It is possible to have the system “Tag” e-mail that is suspicious, but still deliver it to your inbox. If you enable this, suspect mail will be delivered to your inbox with “[Possible Spam]” in the first part of the Subject. This would allow you to set up a filter in your own mail program to move that incoming mail to a special folder for later review. This is NOT a necessary component and is OFF by default.
Quarantine Score: This is the most important score and the one that you would most likely want to adjust. This is the score beyond which a message will be kept in your quarantine area instead of being delivered to your normal inbox. If you want the system to be more aggressive with spam, lower the score. If you want to be more lenient on spam, increase the score. Do so in SMALL increments so you can fine tune the system to your liking. Remember, this is NOT necessary if you just want to accept the System Defaults that we have set for you. The default score is 1.5. If you want the filter to be more aggressive, change it to 1.2 or something like that. Let it work for a few days to watch the result. Remember, small changes can have BIG effects.
Block Score: This is the score above which spam is simply blocked. It will not show up in your quarantine or inbox. It will simply be rejected by the mail server. You will never see it. We have been very careful to set this number. So far, we have not seen ANY legitimate mail get blocked by it. Be VERY careful if you change this number. Setting it lower may cause legitimate mail to simply disappear.
Lastly, on the “Spam Settings” tab is where you can totally disable spam filtering all together. Simply set the “Enable Spam Filtering” button to NO and none of your mail will be filtered.
Under the Preferences section, you will also see the “Whitelist/Blacklist” tab. This is where you can “Allow” and “Block” specific e-mail address and domain names. Addresses and domains on these lists will always be allowed through the filter or always denied, respectively. It is NOT necessary to Blacklist messages that are in your quarantine. They already got filtered so you don’t need to do anything with them except delete them from time to time.
If you want to allow all mail from a particular domain name, you can simply whitelist the domain name instead of the full e-mail address. This is often necessary for systems that send mail to you from many different addresses, but are always from the same domain name. United Airlines is a good example.
Lastly, to report spam that has made it through the filter into your inbox, please see this article in our Knowledge Base:
https://estreet.com/knowledge-base/how-to-use-spamcop-spam-reporting-system/
SpamCop is a great system for reporting spam. Spam that is reported to SpamCop will eventually help improve the accuracy of our spam filters as well.
