Earlier I gave an overview on the Katharion Anti-spam filter available to It Won’t Byte customers. Here’s some more information:
When your domain uses the Katharion Anti-Spam filter, the administrator for that domain will set up a list of users for the domain. Each user then has a number of email addresses that point to that user’s main address.
e.g. for the domain xyz.com, there may be three users:
Then to each user, we’ll attach email addresses.
So now Katharion knows where to send email that is addressed to any of the addresses @xyz.com. Note that there is no ‘catch-all’ available for katharion – if someone emails [email protected], that email address will bounce, even if it is set up on your local mail server, becuase the Katharion system will see it is not one of the above users or email addresses, and drop that email.
The reason to set up different users is because every day, a digest of ‘caught’ (also called ‘quarantined’) email messages is sent to the ‘user’ for a particular email address. So all the spam that is sent to either info@, sales@ and george@ in our example above gets sent in a list to [email protected].
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 your users will need to look at carefully for the first few weeks. This is the area that is most likely to have ‘false positives’.
From this digest email, your users will be able to release the email to let them read it and see if it is spam, and if it is not, they will be able to whitelist it so that it never is considered spam again. The whitelist is based on the sender address.
You may also whitelist specific addresses or even entire domains in advance of messages getting stuck in the quarantine by using the control panel. These whitelists can be per-user, or the administrator for the domain can make domain-wide whitelists and blacklists that affect all users.
Some clients have a central ‘Junk mail officer’ who checks spam for all the users on the domain. In their setup, if George is the JMO, they might set up their domain this way:
In the above example, Todd and Mary and George all get their email delivered to them separatley as usual, but their spam is all held in George’s quarantine, and he is the only one who can release the email (to be sent to the original recipient) if he determines that it may not be spam.
The Katharion system also checks for Viruses, but we recommend a desktop anti-virus system in addition to watch for viruses that are not disseminated by email.
Want to learn more? See Part III of our Katharion details write-up
More questions? Contact [email protected] for assistance.