Introduction | Logging on and Passwords | Forwarding E-mail | Filtering E-mail | Managing Mailboxes | Vacation and Autoresponse | General Preferences | Spam and Viruses

Introduction

Your Wingate E-mail address is an integral method of communication. This is the address used by IRISLink and so is the password your professors already have. It is also the password that is used by various University lists. These lists are used by the University to communicate with students, faculty, and staff in matters of importance. It is, therefore, vital that you become acquainted with your Wingate e-mail account and use it on a regular (even daily) basis.

Your e-mail account has the following features

• A mailbox size of 50 MB
• The ability to send attachments up to 2 MB
• The ability to create mailboxes
• The ability to filter mail and redirect it
• An address book
• A calendar

Introduction | Logging on and Passwords | Forwarding E-mail | Filtering E-mail | Managing Mailboxes | Vacation and Autoresponse | General Preferences | Spam and Viruses

Logging on and Passwords

Introduction | Logging on and Passwords | Forwarding E-mail | Filtering E-mail | Managing Mailboxes | Vacation and Autoresponse | General Preferences | Spam and Viruses

Forwarding E-mail

For those who already have an e-mail account, it is possible to forward your Wingate e-mail and so have only one e-mail account to check. Forwarding e-mail to another account can be very handy, but there are some things to keep in mind. First, you still need to remember you Wingate e-mail userid and password. Should you change e-mail providers (say from Hotmail to Yahoo) you will need to update your Wingate e-mail account to reflect that change. It is also necessary to check your account regularly. Should your non-Wingate e-mail account become invalid for any reason (that includes your account being too full) your e-mail provider will eventually send a message to the Wingate postmaster, with a notification of the error. At that point the postmaster will be obliged to remove the forwarding information. Finally, some providers (such as AOL) are very aggressive about spam being sent to its members and occasionally cut off entire domains without sufficient cause. Should a provider ever list Wingate as a spammer, all forwards to that provider will have to be removed.

To forward you e-mail to a different e-mail account:

• Select Forward from the Account Options . . . drop-down menu
• Enter the address you want your mail to go
• Click the Save button
• To remove forwarding, simply delete the address
• Adding a comma before the forwarding address will send mail to both the forwarding address and your Wingate e-mail account

Introduction | Logging on and Passwords | Forwarding E-mail | Filtering E-mail | Managing Mailboxes | Vacation and Autoresponse | General Preferences | Spam and Viruses

Filtering E-mail

Filtering has two major functions, as a way of automatically sorting your messages and as a way of deleting messages before you even look at them. It is best to use the filtering provided on the server, even if you have filtering tools on an e-mail client such as Outlook or Eudora. The reason for this is that e-mail clients tend not to sort well when communicating with the server. For this same reason it is best not to employ the spam or junk mail settings on clients such as Outlook. The server already has a spam filter and the results can be unpredictable (and sometime disastrous) when client spam filters are invoked.:

The filter consists of two parts, creating conditions for the server to search and defining actions once the condition is met. To filter e-mail.

• Go the the Account Options drop-down menu and select "Filters"
• From the Filters screen click on "Add"
• Select the field (Such as Subject:, To: From: or Body:, etc.) that you want to search. Most of the fields are pretty obvious. "Body" refers to the actual message itself.
• Enter a search string in the text box below.
• Select the "contains" radio button if you want the server to look for the text. This is the typical setting.
• Click on "Add New Condition"

At this point the Webmail server adds the new filter condition. You then have a choice of adding a new condition or specifying some action. Those actions include moving a message to a new location, copying the message to a new e-mail address, forwarding the message, bouncing it, or deleting it. When you are done, click the Finish button.

Move E-mail:

Mail is moved to another box within your account. All you need to do is specify the name of the mail box. For instance, if you want all you messages from Dr. X to go to a box called Xstuff, just enter Xstuff. (it would be a good idea that you already have such a box, see the section on Managing Mailboxes for more details). Moving is also a way to filter potential spam without deleting messages you really want.

Copy E-mail:

In this case the message is kept in your Wingate e-mail account and a copy is sent to an e-mail address that you specify.

Forward E-mail:

Like copy, save that a copy is not kept on your Wingate account.

Bounce E-mail:

E-mail is automatically returned to sender. Some folks like using this against spammers since it can make things appear as if your account doesn't exist. There are some down-sides, first bouncing only means that a message has been rejected; it doesn't necessarily mean that the account doesn't exists. Second, bouncing can take up networking resources, slowing things down for everyone. Finally, if you really wanted the bounced message not only don't you get the message, but the sender receives a notice that you have rejected his or her message.

Delete E-mail:

This simply means that any message that meets your conditions is deleted. As with bouncing you have to be very careful with this option because there will be no way that you will be able to tell whether you have deleted something you really need.

Below is an example of a way to filter out spam.

• Select the Header Field and the Contains radio button
• Enter in the phrase X-Assp-Received-RBL: neutral. One of these phrases is inserted into the headers (and normally not displayed) by the server whenever it comes across mail it sees as potential spam--more on this on the section on spam).
• Click on Add Condition (if you are modifying a rule select Update Condition instead).
• Select an action. The safest action being to move the messages to a mailbox. Try creating a box called "junk" and moving the mail there (see Managing Mailboxes for details on creating mailboxes). This will mean that you have to peak into to junk box to clear out old spam, but it will still allow you to find "false positives" that is to say messages flagged as spam that really were not.
• Click on the Finish button.

The final result should look something like the below

Managing Mailboxes

Your Wingate Webmail comes with the following standard mailboxes (also called folders): Inbox, Sent, and Deleted. The inbox is created as soon as you receive a message, the Sent box is created if you have configured your account to save sent messages (more on this later when looking a general options) and after you send a message and the Deleted box appears should you have configured your account to first move deleted messages there (again, more on this later) and after you delete a message. It is a good thing, however to organize your account to keep as few things in your Inbox as possible for the following reasons: (a) it is hard to find things whenever a mailbox or folder has too many items and (b) the Inbox--being the most used--is more likely than others of loosing messages either to user error or file corruption. Also, as mentioned in Filtering, it is a good idea to create a folder before you establish a filter to send mail to one.

Aside from space concerns, there is no limit to the number of folders one can create. For those of use who are apt to create scores or hundreds of folders, the Wingate Webmail server allows users to create folders within folders.

The creation, renaming, and deletion of folders is very straight-forward.

• Select Folders from the drop-down menu
• You will see a list of the folders you already have, scroll to the bottom of the screen and you will see there are options to add, rename, or delete folders
• To add a folder, type in a name in the Create a Folder field. The name can consist of letters or numbers only--no special characters, including periods.
• Periods have a special function, they help designate sub-folders. If you have a file called MyStuff and you want a subfolder under it called SmartStuff, you would create it by entering MyStuff.SmartStuff.
• When you are done, click on the Create button.
• Renaming a folder consists of going to the Rename a Folder section, selecting a folder from the list, typing in the new name and clicking the Rename button.
• To delete a folder, go to the Delete a Folder section, select the folder you wish to delete and the click the Delete button. Warning: if you delete a folder, all the messages in it will be delete with the folder. Don't delete a folder unless you are positive it is empty or you are certain you really want to delete everything in it.

Introduction | Logging on and Passwords | Forwarding E-mail | Filtering E-mail | Managing Mailboxes | Vacation and Autoresponse | General Preferences | Spam and Viruses

Vacation and Autoresponse

Vacation and autoresponse messages both automatically reply to a sender with a message. There are a few differences between the two, however.

• Vacation messages reply to a sender once while an Autoresponse will reply to every message it receives.
• Autoresponse's can forward the e-mail you receive to a different address but the vacation feature will not.
• Autoresponse's can be generated for messages sent to specific boxes. Vacation messages are generated for each new sender, regardless of what box messages are sent to.
• Vacation messages are designed for when you are unavailable. Autoresponse messages are designed to let senders that you received their messages and will act on those messages expeditiously.

There are a few cautions about using autoresponders and vacation messages. First, don't use autoresponse for every message. People will get tired of seeing an automatic response to each and very message and mail administrators will start to block your address. Also, a good way of getting kicked off an electronic mailing list is to set up an autoresponse. By extension, while the Vacation and Autoresponse feature has a method of detecting mailing lists (placing a Precedence: bulk tag in the header) and won't respond to them, not every mailing list uses the method. When on vacation, the best thing to do is to unsubscribe from mailing lists if you use the vacation feature.

To activate your vacation message, do the following:

• From the Option menu choose My Vacation Message
• Enter your message
• Click the Save button

When you get back from vacation

• Choose My Vacation Message from the Options Menu
• Delete the message
• Click the Save button

To set up an autoresponse

• Choose Autoresponder from the Options Menu
• Choose which mail folder the Autoresponder looks at (Note, see the section on Filtering to see how to direct messages to a specific folder and Managing Mailboxes on how to create folders)
• Optionally, you may add a forwarding address. Note, this is a strictly internal forwarding system. The syntax is userid-mailfolder where userid is the person's username (perhaps your own) and mailfolder is the name of folder the message where the message should be sent.
• Insert a message of at least two lines. The first line is treated as the subject field and the following lines as the message.
• Click the Save button

To remove the autoresponse

• Choose Autoresponder from the Options Menu
• Choose which mail folder the autoresponder looks at
• Remove the message
• Click the Save button

Introduction | Logging on and Passwords | Forwarding E-mail | Filtering E-mail | Managing Mailboxes | Vacation and Autoresponse | General Preferences | Spam and Viruses

General Preferences

There are a number of general preference that one may activate. To get to the general preferences, select Preferences from the drop-down menu. Among the more notable are:

• Sending preferences: For instance, you may choose to save all the messages you send to a Sent folder (the default is not to save sent messages). This can be very useful, but remember what you keep in your Sent folder counts against your 50 MB quota.
• Display preferences: Example of useful preferences here would be how messages are sorted and how many display on one screen. You may choose between sorting by sender (From field), subject, date, or size. The default is to sort by date. One also has a choice between an ascended or descending sort (the default is descending). One may also choose how may message will appear per screen (10, 20, 50, or 100 messages). The default is 20. If your connection is fast enough, you may wish to show more messages per screen. Conversely, if your connection is really slow, you might wish to drop the messages displayed to 10.
• Deletion preferences: Here you get to choose whether to first move deleted messages to a folder called "Trash" or purge them straight away. The default is to purge messages immediately. The advantage of temporality keeping messages in a trash folder is as a measure against an accidental deletion, especially if one inadvertently chooses the "delete all" action when viewing mail. On the other hand, one must regularly purge trashed message because the trash folder does count against one's 50 MB quota and keeping too much mail can needlessly inhibit the performance of one's account. There is also an option to confirm each deletion. This again is a safe-guard, but this feature can be tedious if one receives a lot of messages. The default is to have the feature turned off.

Introduction | Logging on and Passwords | Forwarding E-mail | Filtering E-mail | Managing Mailboxes | Vacation and Autoresponse | General Preferences | Spam and Viruses

A Note on Anti-Spam and Anti-Virus

Wingate University does its up most to keep spam and computer viruses out of its e-mail system. Viruses and spammers change frequently and the University e-mail server is updated daily to protect against them. A major component of the University's anti-spam effort is the use of the SMTP proxy called ASSP (for Anti-Spam SMTP Proxy) from SourceForge. ASSP does the bulk of the spam filtering. ASSP performs the following operations:

1. Scans for missing PTR records. A PTR (or reverse lookup) record validates an IP number based on its address. All legitimate e-mail servers should have such a record. Any mail coming from a computer without a PTR record is rejected.
2. Scans for forged MX records. MX stands for Mail Exchanger. Spammers forge their messages so that they appear to come from a legitimate source. ASSP rejects any messages that are so forged.
3. Blocks Blacklisted HELO Messages. SMTP servers identify themselves with in a specific way with what is called a HELO message. Machines who's HELO messages are in the spam database are blocked.
4. Checks Senders against Real-time Blackhole Lists. There are organizations dedicated to creating lists of spammers. Currently Wingate University checks against three such lists. If a message is found on two of these lists it is rejected as spam. If a message if flagged by only one RBL, ASSP inserts the message X-Assp-Received-RBL: neutral into the header. This can be useful should you wish to filter messages on your end.
5. Performs Keyword Bomb checks. Should certain words appear in a message, the message is rejected.
6. Performs a probability check. ASSP includes a very sophisticated check called a Bayesian probability engine. ASSP looks at all the messages it has previously looked at as good and all the messages it has evaluated to be spam plus any corrections sent in by local users and creates a database against which future messages are checked. This database is updated on a daily basis and so is tuned the the sort of mail Wingate University has a hole receives. In addition, it uploads a list synthesized from all other ASSP users to further tune the database.
7. Maintains a Penalty Box. Spammers often hijack IP addresses or e-mail servers for a short period of time. Trying to block these addresses manually is time consuming and often pointless, since by the time the addresses are entered, the spammer has moved on. ASSP blocks hijacked IPs and MX servers efficiently by temporarily blocking them as they run afoul of one or more of the above checks in a precise weighing scheme.

Besides filtering out spam, ASSP has some controls to prevent alginate messages from being labeled as spam. For instance, anyone you e-mail is placed on a dynamic whitelist. As long as you continue to e-mail a particular address, it will not be blocked. If you suspect that an e-mail address is blocked, you can unblock it simply by sending an e-mail to that address. The downside to this is that you must remember to never e-mail a spammer.

Once a message passes all the tests setup by ASSP it is sent off to the IMail e-mail (SMTP) server that stores the University E-mail. IMail performs some checks of its own.

1. Scans for viruses. E-mail is scanned for viruses. Messages with prohibited attachments (such as those with an .exe extension) are quarantined immediately while all others are scanned. Those failing the scan are also quarantined. Quarantined messages are saved to tape once a week and purged from the server. Quarantined messages saved to tape are kept for one year before being discarded.
2. Scan for Content. Content consists of three things: phrases, web-addresses and individual words. The e-mail server looks for suspect phrases and web-addresses that are kept on a local list. IMail also has a Bayesian engine, though not as dynamic as that of ASSP. Suspect mail is sent to a quarantine folder. This folder is examined regularly and messages wrongly placed there are forwarded to their proper recipients. The spam quarantine is backed up daily to tape. Backed up messages are purged from the server and kept for three weeks.

Things you can do to reduce getting spam in your Inbox include:

1. Forwarding spam to the spam adminstrator (see the rules about reporting spam)
   1. From WebMail send spam to spam@wingatespam.edu. Please note the domain. Because of the way WebMail works, spam messages must go to wingatespam.edu.
   2. From any e-mail client (such as Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird, or Eudora, to name a few) send spam to spam@wingate.edu.
2. Filtering out the messages the e-mail servers have flagged as potential spam.
3. Establishing some other e-mail account from one of the many free services such as Hotmail or Yahoo (to name just two) to handle personal correspondence and business not related to Wingate University. The rationale for this is that the more one publishes an e-mail address the more likely that it will caught be spammers and the various commercial e-mail accounts are easier to change than a wingate.edu address.

There are some limits to reporting spam

• If you forward your e-mail to a personal mail accounts (such as yahoo.com or hotmail.com), you cannot report spam to either spam@wingate.edu or spam@wingatespam.edu.
• Do not report spam that has been sent to your wingate.edu and then forwarded to your personal account to the spam administer of that account. For instance, do not report spam sent to your wingate.edu account that you forwarded to your AOL to the AOL spam administrator. Doing so will block all Wingate e-mail from reaching you (and anyone) at that e-mail account. That is to say, if you report mail forwarded from wingate.edu as spam to AOL, AOL will block all e-mail messages from wingate.edu from reaching any of its AOL users. Wingate reserves the right to remove forwarding to personal e-mail accounts should this courtesy be violated.
• Because Wingate WebMail bypasses the normal e-mail protocols when handling internal mail, it will not see spam@wingate.edu as a legitimate address. You must report spam to spam@wingatespam.edu from Webmail. All other e-mail clients may forward spam to spam@wingate.edu. For instructions on setting up an e-mail client (such as Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora or Thunderbird) see the guide on setting up an external e-mail client.
• Please forward all spam to as attachments. Although it is not necessary to forward a message as an attachment, forwarding messages in-line (where the spam messages are seen in the text) often include characters (such as ">") or words (such as found in footers) that will skew the database. When forwarding spam as an attachment, please remove any signature files and keep the body of message blank. You would not want, for instance, the name of your department to count as spam. If your e-mail program cannot forward messages as attachments, please forward them inline anyway. For instance, WebMail users must forward to spam@wingatespam.edu inline (with the forwarded text in the body of the message). You can minimize skewing by making sure there are no extra characters (such as ">") or words in the body of the messages
• Because ASSP's reporting mechanism will handle messages of up to only a certain size and cuts off larger e-mails, please attach only one message at a time when forwarding to the spam administrator.
• Different e-mail clients (such as Eudora, Outlook, Outlook Express, or Thunderbird) have different menus and defaults for forwarding and forwarding as attachments. You may find that if you wish to report spam, that all forwarding must be by attachment. There are too many e-mail programs for me to go into any detail on the subject here but with one exception (see below).
• When using Outlook, it is often best to create a new message to spam@wingate.edu and the drag and drop the spam messages you wish to forward into the message you are creating.

Even with all our precautions, it is possible, that legitimate mail might have been flagged by the anti-spam or anti-virus systems. You may e-mail postmaster@wingate.edu or call Jimm Wetherbee at 8092, in cases where a message you expected has not arrived and the filters do not seem to be responsive.

Spam Lovers Option

For the truly altruistic, there is the option to be a spam lover--one who accepts spam messages. Why become a spam lover? The anti-spam Bayesian filter is updated by two major factors, (1) mail already flagged as spam ("junk" mail) or ham ("good" mail) and (2) spam reports. The danger is that if nobody counters by reporting mail falsely flagged as spam, that the Bayesian filter will continue to skew toward further restricting ham messages. Since mail flagged as spam is automatically rejected, the way around the problem is for a few kind souls to accept spam and in turn issue a report to correct the mislabeling.

Should you wish to be a spam lover, you need to take the following steps.

1. Contact Jimm Wetherbee and have him put you on the Spam Lovers lists. This will allow all messages, including spam to reach you.
2. You must create a rule to filter out everything flagged as spam.
   1. Create a new folder. I would suggest calling it asspjunk to distinguish it from spam or junk folders that are created automatically by most e-mail clients. Assuming that your e-mail client (such as Outlook or Outlook Express) is configured to use IMAP as your incoming mail server, you should be able to do this from the client. If you are unsure how to create a folder, you may do so from Webmail.
   2. Create a new rule. Follow the instructions for creating a rule in Webmail. What you need to tell the filter to do is:
      1. Select any Header that contains X-SMSMSE-SCL: 9
      2. Move the message to asspjunk
      3. Make sure that this rule is the first item on your list of rules. If it is not, it is possible that some other rule will process a message in such a way that it will not be moved to asspjunk and you will be unable to determine that it is labled as spam.
3. Report mislabeled messages. To correct the Bayesian filter, you need to send mislabeled message to two places:
1. Reply to the sender. This will place the sender on the whitelist and prevent the messages from the sender from being considered spam.
2. Send the message to notspam@wingate.edu. This creates a report which the ASSP filter will use to balance out spam reports.
3. Please note: the restrictions that apply to spam@wingate.edu also apply to replying and reporting to notspam@wingate.edu. You must send these messages from an e-mail client (such as Outlook) that is part of the Wingate University network.

This introduction should be enough to get you started. There are more features, but these are the most commonly used and asked about. Should you have trouble accessing your e-mail or network accounts, please call Jimm Wetherbee at 704-233-8092 or stop by and see him in the Library.

Introduction | Logging on and Passwords | Forwarding E-mail | Filtering E-mail | Managing Mailboxes | Vacation and Autoresponse | General Preferences | Spam and Viruses

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Comments may be sent to Jimm Wetherbee at jimm@wingate.edu
Updated: 12/28/07