Important NSG Email Changes

03-02-2010  |  Return to News Index

We recently upgraded our email server, including some changes in the way potential spam is treated when held. In short, this involves using the "Friends silent mode" instead of the "Spam held mode" as the primary method to quarantine email identified as likely spam.

The blue "Spam" button in the WebMail/SurgeWeb user cgi will soon no longer be available. Please do not use it or change any settings within it. These settings are no longer valid and may cause unpredictable results.

Why Change?

Briefly, this upgrade will result in more accurate and reliable identification of potential spam, and it will provide a much more efficient and convenient method for users to manage email that has been quarantined. The latter is provided with the aid of a daily status e-mail from which you can easily manage held messages. Here is a partial list of the advantages of the new system:

  1. Reduced false positives by making use of the the Friends whitelist. Using the "Friends silent mode", now our default, means that email from people you have mailed in the past will always match the friends whitelist and never get identified as likely spam. All other email over a certain spam rating will be placed in your "(Friends) Pending" folder (displayed in SurgeWeb as the "Spam" folder).

  2. "Friends silent mode" allows you to take advantage of the Friends whitelist without sending an automated "challenge response" to unknown senders.

  3. The new, HTML-formatted status email contains more information about quarantined messages than the old, plain text status email.

  4. Clickable links in the HTML-formatted status email allow for the management of quarantined messages directly from the email client of your choice, eliminating the need to manually log into the WebMail/SurgeWeb user cgi.

  5. The status email, by default, will display only the new messages received since the last status email was sent.

  6. The new system provides a single quarantine location for the storage of all messages identified as possible spam. Traditionally, messages that were flagged as potential spam were stored in the Friends "Pending" folder and/or the Spam "Held Messages" folder.

  7. The single quarantine location can also be made available through imap for those who use WebMail or imap in their email clients.

SurgeWeb

We highly recommend using SurgeWeb for the WebMail interface. It has more options and is more user friendly than the old WebMail, and you can easily configure it to meet your particular needs. The expanded options allow you to customize your account without using the "User Self Management" link. Two exceptions are configuring blogs and mailing lists. You must use "User Self Management" for these features.

SurgeWeb is particularly useful if you are using SurgeMail in a SurgeWall / SpamWall configuration for spam filtering.

Status Email

Here is a closer look at what you can do directly from the new HTML-formatted status email for each message, using a single click:

  1. Deliver the message to your inbox, training the "From" address in your Friends list to ensure future messages from this sender are always delivered without being marked as spam.

  2. View the message safely without it being delivered to your inbox.

  3. Delete the message.

  4. Permanently block all email from this sender and train the spam catcher

  5. Send an email to IsSpam to train the spam catcher without blocking the sender

There are also global options for Spam folder purging from this page without spam training and sending the folder for training and purging.

Another feature of the html status email is that it displays all the relevant addressing headers if they are different from the From header to help identify mail with faked headers. In particular "Reply-To" and "Return-Path".

We have started globally using the daily HTML-formatted status email by default. You can configure to send the old style plain text or new format HTML status email using the user.cgi log page.

However, if you switch back to the old style, you will not have the convenience benefits this new status email gives you. We urge you to take advantage of this significant improvement in convenience..

Questions or Problems?

If you have any questions or problems, please contact us and we will be happy to help you.