| You can add rules to ChoiceMail
to automate the approval or rejection process based on the address or
content of an incoming email message.
Note that unlike most systems where rules are used to
control the disposition of all messages, rules are only needed in ChoiceMail
under exceptional circumstances. For example, if you have a subscription
to a newsletter or you receive messages through a listserver, and the
sender address is different for each incoming message, you can create
a rule based on some other part of the message that will be common to
all messages from the same source.
You will rarely want to add domains to the "Accepted
domains" list unless you are sure that spammers will not be able
to spoof those domains (which typically only happens if the domain is
not known outside your own network).
The "Rejected domains" list is slightly more
useful. Although you normally don't need to worry about individual messages
from new senders because they won't get through to you without registration,
you may decide that you don't even want to send a registration request
to senders from certain domains.
You can tell ChoiceMail One that it should reject all mail whose address
matches a particular domain. Although it is not strictly necessary to
do this from a spam prevention perspective, rejecting certain domains
known for being originators of spam will reduce the number of unknown
senders that appear in ChoiceMail One. You can access the rejected domain
tab by clicking on Actions | Permission Management and then clicking on
the Rejected domains tab.
You can add a complete domain, subdomain, or partial domain. It is also
possible to use wildcards to specify a group of similarly named domains.
Finally, the special name (none) can
be used to refer to an empty domain, i.e. a message from an email address
that contains no domain. Note that the parentheses around the word 'none'
are required.
Examples:
1) Suppose you receive an email from foo@junk.email.com
and you would like to block all emails coming from junk.email.com
in the future. Simply enter junk.email.com
in the edit field and press the Add button.
2) Blocking mail from junk.email.com
will not prevent you from getting email messages from the domain spam.email.com.
However, rather than adding this new domain to the list, you could remove
junk.email.com and replace it with email.com.
3) Now, a minor problem with the above is that it blocks all messages
that end with email.com which means
that a message coming from yourfriend@myemail.com
would also be rejected. If you don’t want this to happen, then change
email.com to .email.com
(note the period in front of the domain name).
4) Sometimes a spammer using fake domains will use a related group of
domains such as email1.com, email2.com,
email3.com and so on. In this case it’s
clearly not practical to add each domain separately. Instead, the solution
is to specify the domain using a wildcard. There are two kinds of wildcards
available. The question mark ? can be
used to represent any single character. The asterisk *
can be used to represent a variable number of characters (including none).
So specifying email?.com will block
any messages whose domain ends with the name email followed by any single
character. A specification of email*.com
will block email.com itself as well
as domains such as email123.com, emailxyzzy.com
and so forth.
Note that ChoiceMail examines the individual rules before checking either
the Accepted or Rejected domains lists. This lets you easily define exceptions.
For example, you may choose to reject all messages from a particular domain
except for those coming from a few particular individuals who are already
known to you. Alternatively, you may choose to accept all messages coming
from a particular domain except those from a few particular senders whose
messages you don't want.
The actual order in which messages are processed through the permission
system is as follows:
- Whitelist/blacklist
- Rules (in the order in which they appear in your message rules list)
- Forged self-message check
- Rejected domains
- Accepted domains
The color of a rule is intended as a quick reminder of
its purpose. Rules in red indicate they will delete or
reject messages. Rules in green indicate that they will
accept messages or senders. Rules that are in BOLD mean
they were created by you as opposed to those that were
included in the base product. You can select a rule and
press the Explain button to get more information about
the selected rule. The built-in rules are normally hidden
unless you check the "View built-in rules" checkbox.
This means that when you open the permission rules view
for the first time, it will not display any rules in it
- you're free to ignore the built-in rules and just add
in a few of your own if you need them. Many people don't
need to add ANY extra rules except perhaps to handle
some newsletters or online vendors.
Click New to create a new rule or click Modify to edit
the selected rule.
Apply: Click apply to apply all the rules to your current
list of unknown senders. This process can take quite a
long time, depending on the number of messages and complexity
of particular rules.
Test permissions: this button opens a dialog where you
can fill in different parts of a form that represents
different parts of an email message. As you fill in the
fields of the simulated message, the dialog will tell
you which permission rule would match the message.
See also:
Creating or modifying an email rule
Accepted and rejected domains
IP blocking
Testing your rules |
