DigiPortal Software
does not provide technical support for creating your own permission rules
and we refer you to our online documentation on
this topic. Information is also available in the user's
guide.
Although ChoiceMail is not a filter-based system, it supports permission
rules so that certain kinds of messages can be easily detected so as
to be accepted or rejected without the need to send out a challenge. Note that our rules don't necessarily look for specific words (although they can) but tend to look for distortions in words, i.e. words that have been broken up, or URLs that have been disguised. So for example, rather than trying detect URLs from particular domains (which change all the time anyway), we will detect that the URL has been obfuscated to hide the real servername.
Below are some sample permission rules that you may find useful in your
own environment. These rules have absolutely no warranty - use them at
your own risk. Their value does depend on your particular needs, types
of spam you receive and so forth. Your mileage may vary.
To use any of these rules, you must first download them to your local
machine. Depending on the browser you are using, simply clicking on
these rules may just cause them to be displayed in your browser. Therefore,
we recommend that you right-click on the rules and select "Save target
As" (Internet Explorer) or "Save Link Target as" (Netscape/Mozilla)
to download the rules. If you have a different browser, check your documentation
for how to save a file referenced by a URL.
Once you have downloaded a rule, you can import it into ChoiceMail
One by opening the permission rules dialog (Actions | Permission Management
| Rules) and then drag the saved rule into the permission rule list.
You must be running a retail copy of ChoiceMail One version 2.52
or greater to use these rules. These rules do not work with ChoiceMail
Free.
- Fire
Me To...
Detects attempts to redirect you to another site through an
innocuously named URL
- Emails
from ADV@...
This permission rule detects emails that come from an address
that starts with adv@. Some spammers use this kind of email
address. This rule will immediately delete such messages.
- Foreign
characters
This rule detects some non-english characters
in the body of an email. Such messages will be deleted. Needless
to say, you should not use this rule if your main language
is not English and you routinely receive mail that uses non-english
characters.
- Dangerous
attachments
This rule detects and deletes messages containing several kinds
of attachments that could potentially contain a virus. This
rule is not necessary if you have a recent anti-virus product
installed (and you should!).
- Drugs
An example rule that detects some well-known drugs - such messages will be deleted immediately. (Updated - 2005-05-06)
- Broken words
This rule detects words that have had digits or some (not all) punctuation marks embedded in them.
- URL with digit portion or %
Detects URLs in the body of messages that have raw IP addresses or % characters in them (typically you should not get such messages from people you don't know)
- Yahoo Newsgroups
Yahoo newsgroups don't obey the standard protocol used by mailing
list servers and ChoiceMail cannot automatically recognize
received messages are in fact from a mailing list server.
This permission rule will recognize incoming mail from Yahoo
newsgroups and prevent ChoiceMail from responding with a
challenge. Random messages from fake newsgroups will still
not actually get through to your email program. You will
still need to explicitly approve mail that you want to receive
from specific newsgroups.
- My
email address in subject line
Every now and again, a spam message appears that contains your
actual email address in the subject field. We're not sure
why spammers do this and we've never seen a legitimate user
do it. Use this rule to delete messages that arrive with
your email address in the subject line.
- Bogus
postmaster messages
This rule detects (and deletes) bogus postmaster messages that come to you
either by spammers pretending to be postmaster or because of bounced challenges.
Note - you should also consider hiding
your email address in outgoing challenges.
- Domains
with .BIZ
This rule detects (and deletes) messages that contain URLs from
the .biz domain. Unless you routinely expect mail from unknown
senders that contain this top-level domain, this rule gets
rid of quite a few messages.
Remember that these rules apply only to new messages coming from unknown
senders. If you receive a message from someone on your whitelist, these
rules will not be triggered.
