 |
||||||||
 |
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
|
||||||||
| |||||||||||||||
Guide to using the Canit SPAM/Virus filter
Canit is a third party software program that we are using on our mail servers to help control the flood of unwanted email (SPAM) many of us receive. If you are a little bit confused about the differences between SPAM, Viruses and Worms, click here for a brief overview. Canit was developed by a company called Roaring Penguin Software and their website is http://www.canit.ca/ . It also includes an excellent anti virus product called Clam, home page at http://www.clamav.net/ The following guide is meant as a brief introduction to how you can use the product, click here for the complete PDF manual. To order service simply complete the form at the bottom of this page. We think you will find the SPAM/Virus filtering well worth the effort! It has made a dramatic difference for most of our staff here that used to suffer from a lot of junk mail.
We have a test account setup so that you can see the Canit user interface and the many features it offers. You can login at http://mail1.thebook.com/canit and for the username use 'thebook-demo' and the password is 'example'. Feel free to click through the various screens and you are free to reject/accept any of the email you see there.
When a foreign mail server contacts our mail server with a mail message for you, our mail server first checks with Canit. Canit takes a look at where the message is from and some of the contents and assigns it a score. If the mail message exceeds an "automatically reject" threshold (which you set), Canit tells our mail server to just reject the message. If the message scores below your SPAM threshold (which you set), Canit tells our mail server to accept and deliver the mail as normal. If the score exceeds your SPAM threshold (but is below the automatically reject" level), Canit tells our mail server to report a "temporary failure" to the other mail server. A "temporary failure" is normally used to say we can't accept the message right now, but please try again later. This is the first step in catching SPAM -- almost all the junk mailers will never try to resend a message. If they can't get it to you the first time, they just give up and go on. They are trying to send out email to hundreds of thousands of addresses and don't have the time or space on their servers to resend. When you login to Canit to control your mail, these types of message are displayed as "One Shots." It is very rare to see valid mail in this category since any valid mail server will always attempt another delivery. If you do nothing, these are automatically classified as SPAM in 3 days and moved to that category. If a message that looked like SPAM is resent a second time, it is moved from the "One Shot" category, to "Pending Messages." This is what you should check periodically and is also called the "Trap Contents". They are most likely SPAM, but may be valid. Canit makes is very easy for you to see the messages sorted by different criteria and to then identify handling, i.e. you can reject the message, you can allow future messages to come through from that specific sender or host machine, or you can block them in the future. If you click on the date field hyperlink, you can see a detailed report on the incident and exactly why that message was scored as it was. It is also important to know that if a message is held as possible SPAM, the sender does get a message from the system explaining the message is under review, the text is: Special Exceptions - We are doing some special filtering. If a message has an attached windows executable file (which usually means a virus), it will be held for your review as a "Pending Message." If the machine sending us the message is on an "open relay" list, called an RBL (realtime black list) it will also be held for your review. These messages are left there for 7 days before automatically being moved to the "SPAM" category. Anything over 10 days old is later purged from the system.
When Canit service is established for your domain you have two basic options:
You may login to Canit at http://user1.thebook.com/canit with the username and password we assigned you. The first screen you will see give you some statistics about what is currently in the trap and you can follow the "Message" links to see the actual email messages, e.g. the One-Shot Messages link will show you those messages which have not been resent after being given a "temporary failure." as describe above. Across the top you will see some links to the main features of the system:
In day-to-day use you will just check your email as normal. If you look at the "full headers" of your email message you will see some additional lines like the following. They give you some information on the message and can also confirm that your mail is going through the SPAM processing: X-CanItPRO-Stream: thebookspam (your domain
name) At least once every few days it is a good idea to login and check your "Pending Messages" -- if they all look like SPAM you can just press "Reject All" at the bottom of the page. There is usually no need to do anything with the "One Shot" messages, they are almost always SPAM -- the system will leave them there for 3 days and then move them into your SPAM count. For your "Pending Messages" you do have an option to "Accept the message" -- which means that the next time it is resent by the other mail server, it will be delivered. But we find that a lot of mail servers will give up very quickly. Since you are able to read the message in the web browser, we recommend you copy and paste the text somewhere you can keep the message. 1. How can I know if mail was blocked by SPAM filtering? You can check activity over the past several hours via your Site Control Panel. We have augmented the SPAM Rejected Mail wizard to show mail that was held/rejected by Canit. The information is limited, you would need paid Canit service to get full details. Complete info on Canit (including demo info) at: http://www.thebook.com/canit.html 2. I don't like all this. I want my SPAM. I don't want to miss ANY messages? Check the network_status link above for complete rationale. In brief, SPAM is being less and less tolerated on the Internet. We were finding ourselves blocked by other providers such as AOL & Comcast because of SPAM email that was forwarded through our servers. That type of block puts an extreme hardship on all our subscribers. 3. I was trying to send an outgoing message and it was rejected because of potential SPAM content. Can I found out why? The new filtering even looks at outgoing mail and can label it as SPAM. This is rare, but more likely if your business involves sending out sales material. You would need to first sign-up for paid Canit service for at least one email address at $1/month. Then send yourself the questionable message and check it within Canit. It would have a complete report as to why the message was found objectionable. 4. I wish there weren't additional fees involved. Why can't full use of Canit be included with service? Canit is a very nice environment, but it is CPU and database intensive. We anticipate paying $5-$10/year for each user. This doesn't include additional equipment and administrative time at our end. The lowest level of service we offer is for one email address at $1/month or $12/year. We are not really profiting on this service. 5. I have paid Canit service and I find a lot of messages caught by the word analysis that is done (statistical analysis/Bayes training). Can I control that? Yes, after login select "Rules" and then "Bayes Settings". DO NOT make any changes to the Bayes Training table. At the bottom of the page you see the additional points Canit adds to a messages SPAM score depending on the %probability reported by Bayes that the message is SPAM, e.g. if the statistical Bayes analysis reports a 95% chance the message is SPAM, 5 points is added. You can reduce those numbers. 6. This is stuff is really technical, I don't want to deal with it! If you can make an effort to read the on-line documentation our staff is happy to explain how it operates. A few years back most people didn't want to deal with 'web' sites either. We pride ourselves on good technical services that give you flexibility and control. Many of you that send email to AOL and others realize a message can be dropped/rejected even before it gets to the user. Our free service matches that. Our paid service gives you more complete control. 7. What happened to the old filtering control you used to offer via the control panel? Most of that is being removed since Canit provides even better functionality. Only a few low level checks may be kept. NOTE: Spam filtering will NOT change how you check your email on our servers or how you control forwarding for your mail. It will not affect your outgoing mail.
In the form below, please specify the name and email address of your PRIMARY contact for SPAM filtering. Because SPAM filtering does have a lot of options and we are trying to reduce your support costs -- this will be the only person we will respond to for help. Any other users should contact this person if they have questions. Unless we have questions you can expect filtering to be activated within 24 hours of submitting this request. You will get an email message when it has been activated and it will give you a specific URL for login. . |
|
