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Overview

IS&T has introduced a new anti-spam technology to help combat the rising increase of malware, phishing, and spam, Symantec's Brightmail AntiSpam. It stores messages identified as Spam in a Spam Quarantine location outside of your mailbox for two weeks before purging them. The storage of Spam messages outside your mailbox helps conserve valuable mail resources such as disk space and your email quota, and also helps simplify your management of Spam messages through automated daily summaries the Brightmail appliance sends to you each morning. You can view the messages identified as spam and customize your Spam Quarantine settings on the web at the Symantec Brightmail Gateway.

IS&T transitioned the email community to Spam Quarantine during the spring of 2009. You can enable Spam Quarantine at the Spam Screening Settings page. For instructions, see: Q: How do I switch my IMAP email account spam filtering from MIT Spam Screening to Spam Quarantine? If you set an allow/deny list with MIT Spam Screening, you can still access the Spam Screening Settings page to view your allow/deny list entries. You can recreate those allow/deny lists in the Spam Quarantine system at the Symantec Brightmail Gateway.

How It Works

The Brightmail AntiSpam appliance scans all incoming email before its delivered to your IMAP mailbox. All messages that are identified as potential Spam are immediately put in the Brightmail Spam quarantine instead of being delivered to your inbox.

Note: As Spam Quarantine handles spam filtering on the server for all your email programs and web email access, IS&T recommends turning off Junk Mail filtering in your email programs. Using both systems can cause inconsistent results and prevent your allow/deny lists from working as intended. For instructions, see Q: How do I turn off my email program's Junk Mail filtering?

Spam Quarantine Summary Email

Each morning at 6AM an email message will be delivered to your inbox that contains a summary of the messages identified as spam that are stored in your quarantine. Here is an example of a Spam Quarantine Summary message:

You can manage messages directly from the summary emails by clicking on the Release and View links. Clicking on View logs you into the Spam Quarantine and displays the selected message. Clicking on Release will also log you into the Spam Quarantine and release the selected message from the quarantine. The message will be sent to your inbox and the Quarantine Summary will be displayed.

Managing Your Spam Quarantine

At the Symantec Brightmail Gateway you can:

• Review messages identified as spam
• Manage your allow/deny lists
• Manage your language settings

To access these features, go to the Symantec Brightmail Gateway and login with your MIT Kerberos username and password.

Once logged in, you can manage your Spam Quarantine settings from the User Preferences links on the left-hand side of the screen.

By default, the language setting is "Receive mail in any language". We recommend changing the setting to Only receive mail in the following languages: and selecting English to reduce the amount of spam you receive. If you receive mail in any other languages, be sure to select those as well.

For information on customizing your good/bad senders list, see: Q: How do I add an email address to my "bad senders" or "good senders" list? What options are available (e.g., wildcards)?

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