Date: 9/16/02 1:07 AM To: Bulletins From: Luis Soltero Copy: Mark Freeberg Blind Copy: Subject: Mail filters Part 2 of 2 This is part 2 of a 2 part series on mail filtering... The last bulletin addressed server side mail filtering. In this bulletin we address two issues. Modifying your mail filter settings and client side mail filtering. Customizing your server side mail filtering options... Let's say that attachments of 50 K are too large. You would like the cut off to be 20K. or lets say you want to receive all HTML mesgs via wireless... Or you might want to move all mail arriving from westmarine.com into the BigMail folder (or the Trash) and not have these arrive to you via wireless... All these modification + many more are under your control... To access your personal mail filter rules simply use the marinenet webmail program. Logon using a web browser and any of the url's listed in the previous e-mail (webmail.marinenet.net for example). Once you are logged in select "Edit Mail Filters" at the top of the page to view and/or modify your mail filtering rules. You will now see two existing mail filters... The BigMail filter is the one that moves files larger than 50K in to the BigMail box. The HTML filter routes any mesg with HTML content to the BigMail folder. To change the default behavior of these filters simply click on the desired one and hit edit. Make your changes hit submit followed by save all changes. Or simply delete them if you don't want server side filtering. The filter page is self explanatory... To create a new filter to remove westmarine.com mail simply push "add" and then start filling out the form. As simple as 1 2 3... The server side mail filter is currently under development so please note the following quirk if you do modify or remove your mail filters... The Mail filter will send you mail mesgs when the 50K threshold is met. So if you set the limit to 20K the mail will be quietly moved into your BigMail folder but you will not receive an info mesg. If you set the limit to say 100K and a 75K mesg arrives the mail filter will tell you that a 50K file has been moved into your BigMail folder but it really hasn't. The same is true with the HTML filter. If you remove the HTML filter all HTML mail will be delivered to your InBox but you will still receive mesgs stating that the mail has been stripped and that a copy has been moved into the BigMail folder. I will be addressing these issues soon. In the mean time know that if you change the default behavior of your mail filters, filtering will occur according to your rules but the mail filter will send you inaccurate mesgs about what it has actually done. Simply ignore them. For most users the default settings are appropriate and do not need modification. Client side filtering... Client side filtering uses some advance features in Calypso to route the mail... **** VERY IMPORTANT NOTE ***** Only Satellite users should use this feature... *** HF USERS SHOULD NOT USE THIS **** The reason for this is that client side filtering requires quite a bit of overhead communication between calypso and the server. This communication will dramatically reduce the performance of HF users and may cause your HF connections to HANG at times. To enable size filtering in calypso select the following menu Mailbox->Accounts->Properties->"Your mailbox (e.g. Globalstar Mail)" and select the "Incoming Mail" tab. now check "When mesg size is greater than ____ retrieve only the first ____ lines." and fill in the blanks. *** HF USERS Please verify that this option is NOT selected in your current setup *** When you establish a connection to the server and a mesg greater than the threshold is found only the first few lines of the mesg will be downloaded. The unfiltered mesg will remain on the server. After you review this abridged mesg you have several options. a) put it in the trash. b) mark it for retrieval now or c) mark it for retrieval later. Every one of these actions will require you to connect to the server to complete. If you put the mail in the trash you will need to "Empty" the waste basket before the server will remove the mesg on it's end. The "Empty" action requires a connection to the server so that the file can be removed. The more mesgs you leave on the server the slower your initial connects will get. The reason for this is that the pop server has to inform calypso on the status of all the files "left" on the server before any downloads can happen. The more files you have in your waste basket the slower the connect operation. If you use this kind of filtering please purge your waste basket often. Action (b) causes an immediate connect to download the mesg... and action (c) will download the entire mesg from the server the next time you connect. both (b) and (c) remove the file from the server when the transfer is done... under no circumstances should you check the "Leave message on mail server after it's retrieved". This option will really bog things down for you! Calypso also supports spam filtering but it is not practical since it requires you to download the offending mesg before it can act on it. If you want to filter out span use the server method described above. For more information on client side filtering see the calypso guide under the help menu. Things on the horizon... I am currently working on implementing server side virus scanning so that your mail will have been inoculated before you receive it. And finally I am looking at a package called spam assassin to try to automatically reduce spam as it arrives on the system before it gets delivered to you. You will receive updates as these packages get implemented... Both the spam and anti-viral filter will require no action on your part. That's it for now... Happy filtering. --luis