Welcome to the Katharion Anti-Spam Filter!
The first thing you’ll notice is that you’ll get less spam. You could actually stop here, but becuase you’ve just moved to this system, the filter doesnt’ know the types of emails that YOU might get that you say are NOT spam.
So we need to watch out for ‘false positives’ – this is the term used when a spam filter catches a ‘nonspam’ email and thinks that it is Junk email.
Our next step is to ‘train’ the filter to know which of our emails that it thinks of as spam are not really spam.
Training the Spam Filter: Whitelists, Blacklists, Quarantine
Every evening, you will get a digest containing ALL the email that was caught by the filter over the last 24 hours. The digest email is split into two parts: Probable spam, and Definite spam. Using traffic patterns, advanced content detection and other methods, Katharion splits your incoming ‘flagged’ junk mail into those two sections. Probable spam is the section that you will need to look at carefully for the first few weeks. This is the area that is most likely to have ‘false positives’.
On each email, under each section, it will show you the sender’s name and address, and the subject line of the email that has been quarantined. For the first week or so, you’ll want to go slowly through this list and look at both the subject line and the from: address. Sometimes companies use re-mailers to send out their bulk emails, and I personally have had items from reputable mailers quarantined because of their sender (Constant Contact, for example has agreements with most filtering companies that their mailings won’t be quarantined.)
I found an email that is NOT spam!
When you find an email that is good (or suspected to be good) you’ll click the ‘Release‘ button next to that email. This ‘Releases’ the email from quarantine and allows it to be delivered to your standard email program. (e.g. outlook). If you already know that this email is from a sender you want to ‘whitelist’ (always have their emails delivered to you without quarantine), then you can click the ‘whitelist’ button that will show up on the next page. If you’re not sure from looking at the subject and/or from: of the email if it is a good email or not, you can release it from quarantine, wait to get it in your inbox, and THEN go back and click the whitelist button.
If you already have a list of email addresses that you wish to whitelist, you can add it to your own personal whitelist after logging into your account.
Do I have to do this EVERY day?
After about a week or two, you may find that a few days will go by between seeing a suspected ‘false positive’ in your quarantine. When that day comes, you can turn off the daily digest emails, and then you’ll just check on the server if you think that an errant email has been caught.
To sign on, you’ll visit http://iwbyte.katharion.com/ and log in with your email address and password (which It Won’t Byte will supply you). On the web site, the last 1,000 messages are stored – this could be 2 days or 2 weeks, depending on how many messages you get in a day. You’ll also be able to see cool data like what percentage of your emails are spam, and customize the sending of your digest emails.
But what about…
If you have other questions, feel free to contact [email protected] and we’ll help you out.