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Northern Ontario Wires Inc.
Town of Cochrane
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Ontera is happy to provide it's customers with mail filtering software which
will allow you to drastically reduce the amount of unwanted/unsolicited email
that you receive. When you turn on mail filtering, our software scans each
message that comes to your mailbox for specific characteristics which can
indicate whether the message is of an undesirable nature. You can control
exactly how strict you want to be about these filters using this Ontera Online
tool.
There are four (4) levels of filtering that can be
configured here:
No Email filter
No email filtering will occur on this email address.
RBL Filter
RBL stands for "Realtime Black List". The RBL lists mail servers or other
devices that have either distributed unsolicited email (SPAM) in the past or are
configured in such a way that they ALLOW SPAM to be sent through them, without
attempting to block it. Ontera's mail filtering software has the ability to
check whether an email sent to your mailbox has come from a device on the RBL.
If it has, then the message is rejected. This type of filter may only block
10-30% of all SPAM coming into your mail box and so is most effective when used
in conjunction with one or more of the other filters.
Spam Level Filter
This type of filter is called a "content" filter. Our mail filtering software
will scan all messages coming to your email address for characteristics that are
known to be common with unsolicited emailings. Some examples of common
characteristics of unsolicted email are:
- vulgar words
- phrases such as "100% FREE!" or "Click here to unsubscribe"
- bad grammar
- extra long sentences
- URL's embedded in the message
- suspect header information
- large fonts
The different levels of the filter (Very Relaxed to Very Strict) determine how
many "matches" need to occur before the message is rejected. Obviously there
would need to be less matches with the very strict level than with the Medium or
Relaxed level.
Customize own Filter
This type of filter will allow advanced users to create rules of their own to
control SPAM. You can have up to 10 sets of Rules and Actions, and the mail
filtering software will start at the top and work it's way down the list of
rules looking for a match. For this reason it is necessary to put the rules in
an order so that the least restrictive rule is first, followed by more
restrictive rules. For instance, you may want to drop (reject) ALL messages
which meet the Medium Spam level criteria, so put that as the first rule. The
2nd rule could be that you want to CONFIRM all messages that meet the Medium
Strict Spam level criteria.
Rules
Bounced Email -> These are emails that were bounced back to you for some
reason. It could be a valid reason, such as entering an incorrect email address,
in which case you will want to know if you have entered an incorrect address.
However, it is common for mailers of SPAM (as well as some Viruses) to use other
people's email address in the FROM: field of their unsolicited email. When their
SPAM is rejected (for whatever reason) the message does not get bounced back to
the spammer, it gets bounced back to who's ever email address is in the From:
line of the SPAM. This could be your address!
Real Time Blacklist -> Discussed above.
Spam Levels -> From Very Strict to Medium Relaxed, these are some of the
levels discussed above. Choosing Very Strict will tell our mail filtering
software that it needs only a few matches (characteristics of SPAM messages) to
reject/confirm the email message. In other words, MORE messages will be
rejected/confirmed and it's also possible that legitimate messages may be
rejected. For this reason we suggest you use the CONFIRM action if you want to
choose a Strict level of filtering. A Medium Relaxed setting will need more
matches in order to classify a message as SPAM. A common practice would be to
set a rule for a Medium Level of SPAM which would be set to REJECT messages and
then below it, set a Very Strict or Strict rule which would CONFIRM the
messages.
Vulgar Words -> This is a simple filter which will scan the incoming
messages for vulgar words. These include but are not limited to: curses, certain
body parts, racist slurs, ethical slurs etc...NOTE: This type of filter does not
work like the SPAM Levels where you need a certain amount of matches, ONE match
is all that is required for this rule to invoke the ACTION.
All Other Emails -> This means all messages that don't fall into any of
the other categories (or rules) that are setup. 99.9% of the time this will be
your last rule and will say "ACCEPT MAIL" because if the message has gotten
through the other filters, it must be good right?
Actions
Accept Mail -> This action means, put the incoming message into my
mailbox, do not filter it.
Drop Mail -> This means delete the message. Do NOT send a rejection
notice to the person who sent it and do not show it to me. The sender *may*
think the message has been delivered because they do not receive a rejection
notice.
Bounce back to Sender -> This means reject the message and send a BOUNCE
message back to the sender telling them that their message was rejected as SPAM.
Ask Sender to Confirm -> This means that the suspect message will be
held, until a confirmation is received from the sender of the message to confirm
that they are indeed sending a valid message to you. The sender of the message
will receive a confirmation email asking them to reply to the message in order
to confirm their identity. The reason this is effective in curtailing SPAM is
that people sending unsolicited messages rarely use a valid email address in
their "From:" field of the SPAM and so this confirmation letter will end up
being rejected or dropped by a remote mail server. Hence, you don't get the
SPAM. However, if it's really your Uncle Sam trying to get in touch with you, he
can simply reply to the Confirmation message and his email will be delivered.
People who reply to Confirmation messages are added to your Auto Confirmed
Whitelist.
Language Filtering
If you check "Turn on Language Filter" you are able to check off languages which
you do not want to receive in your inbox. For instance, by checking all the
languages you will only receive default Western style languages in messages,
like English and French. The most common configuration would be to check off ALL
languages in the list. If you want to receive messages in Chinese for instance,
you would simply uncheck that box. For the best protection you should check all
languages.
The default setting for new email addresses and/or
existing ones that have never had a mail filter setup on them is just to block
messages coming from the RBL. However, if you choose "Customize Own Filter" then
the following defaults will take effect:
| 0: Spam Level: Medium |
Action: Drop Mail |
| 1: Spam Level: Medium Strict |
Action: Ask Sender to Confirm |
| 2: Bounced Email |
Action: Accept Mail |
| 3: Real Time Blacklist |
Action: Drop Mail |
| 4: All Other Emails |
Action: Accept Mail |
Auto Confirmed Whitelist
This list contains email addresses of people who have confirmed messages to your
mailbox. This means they sent you an email which was sent back to them to
confirm they are a legitimate sender, and they replied to confirm. You are able
to manage this list by removing email addresses that you don't want in there.
Any emails that come from addresses in this list will reach your mailbox
regardless of mail filters.
Whitelist
This list is completely customizable by you. Here you would enter email
addresses of people who you always want to receive messages from, regardless of
content. Any messages that come in from addresses in this list always get
delivered to your mailbox, bypassing any mail filters that might have normally
rejected the message.
Not only can you list email addresses but you can also list domains.
The domain is the part of your email address after the @ sign. An example of
when you might want to use domains instead of email addresses is if you want to
make sure all emails from your co-workers make it to your mailbox. The syntax to
add a domain to your whitelist is:
*@domain.com
The * means everything from this domain.
Blacklist
This list will contain email addresses and domains the same as the Whitelist
except that these are addresses and domains that you want to BLOCK from sending
email to you. Like the Whitelist, this list is customizable by you. Any email
coming from an address or domain in this list will be rejected, regardless of
whether or not it's classified as SPAM.
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