printer-friendly

Home > Old RESPITE 2 Documentation

Table of Contents

• General interface changes
• Home page format
• Pending message handling changes
• Alias recipient scanning
• Real-time blackLists
• SPF testing support
• Bayesian filtering

General Interface Changes

The interface has been changed to try and be more intuitive and offer a better feel. The menus have been moved from the top of the screen into a more naturally flowing tree on the left of the screen. Also, a drop-down menu of all streams that you can access is provided on the upper-right hand corner of the windows, so you can easily switch streams without having to go to a seperate screen, and then return to the one you were at.

Home Page Format

Users who only have one stream will notice no change to their Home screen. However users with multiple streams opted-in will see a new-format login screen like the one shown below:

The current stream is highlighted in bold. Clicking on any address will immediately switch you to that stream. Clicking on any number will take you to that repective Trap page for that particular stream, by switching your stream and immediately forwarding you to the trap page. This is a much easier and faster way for users who manage many traps to do so in an efficent manner.

Pending Message Handling Changes

You will now notice that there are a few new Stream Options to chose from, including two controlling e-mail notifications of pending messages. These options are:

• Send e-mail notification of pending messages
• Age (in days) of oldest trapped message before triggering notice

These will allow you to change the age of the trap before R2 will send a notice of pending mesasges, or you can turn off the option all together and never receive the pending message notices.

You will also notice one other option associated with Pending messages:

• Action to perform when message is expired due to age

This option will finally allow you to tell R2 to simply discard messages as spam if you havn't made a decision on them in the alloted time. This option, combined with the Send notification option above will allow you to configure R2 so that you will never be bothered by it again, but still allow you to trap messages and hold them in case of a false positive

Alias Recipient Scanning

New to R2, is the ability for the system to scan messages delivered to aliases to also be scanned by the recipients of the alias as well, even if the alias is not opted-in. For example, Sue and Joe are both part of the "foo" alias, and a message comes into the foo alias. If the alias is opted-in to R2, the alias will scan the message. If the alias deems the message non-spam, or if the alias is not opted-in, the alias is the expanded to Sue and Joe. Here is where R2 seperates from RESPITE: R2 will then rescan the message, both for Sue and Joe, using their own address and settings. If the message is spam, both Sue and Joe will catch the message in their traps.

Please note, however - If the foo alias traps the message as spam, and the message is subsequently released, the message will bypass the recipients traps (thus NOT being scanned by the recipients) and be delivered directly, since someone had already decided that the message was not spam.

Real-Time Blacklists

R2 now uses 3 Real-time blacklists to (optionall) try and trap or reject messages coming from blacklisted host. The blacklists and their purposes are:

• sbl.spamhaus.org - verified spam sources (including spammers, spam gangs, and spam support services)
• xbl.spamhaus.org - illegal 3rd party exploits, including open proxies (HTTP, socks, AnalogX, wingate, etc), worms/viruses with built-in spam engines, and other times of trojan-horse exploites
• relays.ordb.org - verified open SMTP relays

These RBLs were chosen as conservative and reliable blacklists with acceptable guidelines for listing and delisting. More information on the blacklists can be obtained from their respective sites (www.spamhaus.org, www.ordb.org). Rensselaer does not control which hosts are listed on the blacklists, and any inquiries or complains about the listings of the blacklists should be directed to the respective organizations.

It is hightly recommended that you use this service to Hold messages on our real-time blacklists, unless you have correspondance with unfortunate people on spammy, blacklisted networks.

SPF Testing Support

R2 now also support Sender Policy Framework testing against incoming messages. SPF is a new technology (homepage: http://spf.pobox.com/) which attempts to address e-mail forgery. This is NOT an anti-spam measure alone, however it makes it much harder for spammers to forge other, well-known addresses like aol.com or citibank.com, for example. For information on SPF, please refer to the SPF homepage, and refer to the SPF section of the R2 Users Guide for help on implementing SPF checks into your trap.

Bayesian Filtering

Bayesian analysis

This is an advanced feature that analyzes the word structure and content of messages you deem to be spam and non-spam, and uses that information to categories incoming future mail. This requires very active participation, especially when first starting to build your 'corpus' of spam and non-spam, however for those looking for that extra few percent of accuracy, this is a must-use.

Last modified: February 3, 2007