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Red Shift Internet News Letters
Red Shift Newsletter for July 2005
Special Newsletter on SPAM and Virus Email.
INTRODUCTION:
You can now adjust Red Shift's built-in spam filtering for your individual email account(s). You can reduce filtering to almost nothing or increase it to be very aggressive, all online, no need to contact our technical support staff.
Feedback that we have received from customers regarding email filtering falls basically into two camps: There are customers who want heavy filtering so as to eliminate all spam and viruses, and there are customers who want very light filtering, or none at all to avoid the risk of missing legitimate email that might inadvertently get caught in a filter. Our response to these opposing criteria is to provide direct control over filtering and filtering strengths to our customers. The ability to impart this control to our customers is one of the results of a yearlong development project that was completed two months ago and has been in testing for the last two months. We are now ready to hand over mail filtering options to our customers, to configure according to each individual's needs.
HOW TO ADJUST YOUR SPAM FILTERING:
Go to the website http://webmail.redshift.com. Once you are there, a login screen will appear. Login with your email address and then input your password for that email address. Once you are logged in, click on the "Options" menu item and then click on "Spam Filters". You will see that besides filtering strengths, you can also setup email whitelists and blacklists (explained in the FAQ below). You will need to login to each email address individually that you wish to alter. If your account is @redshift.com, you can type in just the first part of your email address instead of the entire email address (i.e., if your email address was jsmith@redshift.com, you could login with jsmith). If you have your own domain, you need to type in the whole email address.
In the following paragraphs is an outline of how we handle spam and virus filtering by default and the changes that you can make to your account.
VIRUS SCANNING:
By default all email that comes into our network is scanned for viruses. If the email is infected we reject it and you won't receive it. This is now optional. If you do not want your email scanned for viruses, you can request this by sending email to support@redshift.com. When you email to this address, an inquiry ticket will be automatically created and you will receive email from the ticket system when the ticket is completed.
EMAIL ATTACHMENTS:
The virus scanner automatically blocks attachments to email that have certain extension names known to be potentially dangerous to your computer. If you wish to attach files to your email that have these extensions, you can email us and ask us to remove a particular extension from your settings, or you can add extensions to your settings. Email support@redshift.com to make these changes. The extensions that we block by default are:
.vbs .lnk .scr .wsh
.hta .pif .exe
SPAM FILTERING:
Our spam filtering system recognizes "strengths" of between 1 and 10; Level 1 is very aggressive, stopping almost all mail, and should be avoided unless you're trying to lockout an account. Level 10 is "very light" filtering: almost everything comes through. Your default setting, if you change nothing, is 9. In the future we may turn off or alter the default filtering value; therefore it is important for you to set these values to those that you prefer. If you want no filtering at all, and a strength of 10 still isn't light enough for you, you may email support@redshift.com and have filtering removed entirely from your account.
EMAIL FAQ:
Q. What is an email Blacklist?
A. A list containing email addresses to which all email is blocked, no matter what other filtering options are chosen. Each email address in the blacklist is completely blocked from sending email to you, or allowing you to receive email from it.
Q. What is a email whitelist?
A. The exact opposite of a blacklist. In a whitelist all filtering is totally disabled for all the names within it. Email to these addresses will always be accepted, regardless of other settings, including all spam also directed to that email address.
Q. Why am I getting junk mail when it is not even to me (the To: line isn't even my email address)?
A. Spammers only put one or just a few names in the To: line of the spam email, and then often add hundreds or thousands of names the BCC: line. The BCC: line stands for "Blind Carbon Copy". It doesn't matter if the name in the To: line isn't you, your email address will be one of the many on the BCC: line; which is a line that is hidden in most email readers. You would need to view "Full Headers" to see this information.
Q. I did not send any spam, why am I getting all this returned mail saying that I did?
A. Often viruses and spammers will forge the From: and To: lines in email. Someone in another country could send email out with your email address in the From: line. When the email is rejected, it is returned to the address in the From: line which, when spam is involved, is not the real sender. If you get these bounces, you were just unlucky enough to have had your email address spoofed by a spammer. All Internet companies who see this will know you're not the real spammer.
Q. Why do I sometimes get duplicate email?
A. This happens whenever one message is mailed to multiple addresses that reach the same person. Examples of such scenarios are:
* One message is sent to you, and to an email alias that also lists your email address. Therefore you receive one copy of the mail directly, and one copy via the alias.
* One message is sent to multiple aliases that list your email address. You receive one copy of the mail via each alias for each alias.
* Problems in the database on our mail machine doing virus checking. If the mail machine, for some reason, does not process the mail completely, it will assume it failed and try again. This is the fail-safe design of the mail protocol we use and it tells the sending machine to re-send the message since it is not sure it was received properly. The design of this system is based on the premise that it's better to get a duplicate than to miss an email.
Q. I reported an email problem and the tech asked me to send him the full headers, what is that and how do I do that?
A. Email headers are the lines at the top of an email message that comprise the instructions to email servers on the Internet as to how to deliver your email. Your email program normally shows you only the standard To:, From:, Subject:, and Date: line parts of the header, but there are many more than what you normally see.
You can instruct most email programs to display the full headers
of any email that you receive. Here's how:
While viewing the email in your email program do the following, according to which of these readers you are using:
In Eudora: Click on the "Blah Blah Blah" button (yes, it.s really called that)
In Netscape: Click on "View", then "Headers" then "All".
In Outlook Express: Click on "View", then "Options".
Below are two very nice web pages that expain headers in greater detail
http://www.stopspam.org/email/headers.html
http://www.codecutters.org/spam/smtpheaders.html
Karl Van Lear
President
Red Shift
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