MailCleaner Anti-spam filter

MailCleaner is a filter that rids your mailbox of spam (unsolicited e-mail advertisements) and viruses, allowing you to concentrate on the important messages that are truly intended for you.

To accomplish this, MailCleaner subjects all incoming messages to a battery of heuristic tests to detect phrases and formatting that are often used by spammers.

If these tests alone were systematically successful, then the problem of spam would be definitively solved. Even though the success rate is high (greater than 95%), measures must be taken to handle potential errors: False positives and false negatives.

Quarantine

When a spam is detected by MailCleaner, by default it is placed in quarantine rather than delivered to your mailbox. You can access the quarantine to release or analyze retained messages via the user interface at user.mailcleaner.net. The username is the same as your mail account username and is often simply your e-mail address.

Once you're logged into the user interface, you can release a held message for delivery just as easily as you can ask for an immediate analysis of the message to see why it was considered spam. You can also customize your account: Choose the frequency that spam reports are delivered to you, decide whether or not spam is quarantined or simply tagged (that is, adding specific text to the Subject line, like "{Spam}", so that you can filter it yourself using your mail program), and group all of your related e-mail addresses together into one easy-to-manage account.

False Positives

A false positive is a valid message that has been erroneously identified as spam. Because there is always the possibility of a false positive, MailCleaner places all messages identified as spam in quarantine and deletes such messages only after a period of several weeks. You then have two options for retrieving one or many of these messages:

• Access the user website directly from the mailcleaner.net website by clicking on Client Tools. From there, you can easily browse your quarantine. From the quarantine list, you can release messages () so that they're delivered to your mailbox, see why a message was marked as spam (), or request an analysis () of a message by our specialists if you find that this message shouldn't have been marked as spam.

• Periodically, MailCleaner sends a report listing all quarantined messages. You can change the frequency that you receive these reports (daily, weekly, or monthly) via the user interface. By default, the report will be delivered monthly. From the quarantine page of the user interface, you can request such a report at any time by clicking on "send an immediate summary".

In the report, quarantined messages are presented as follows:

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Message ID: 18iFot-0006q7-00

        From: "John Spammer" <JohnS@bidon.com>

        Date: Sun, 09 Feb 2003 18:14:51 +0800

        Subject: Talk to your guinea pig !

        Force: http://mailcleaner/release_mail.php?msg_id=18iFot-0006q7-00

------------------------------------------------------

Message ID: 18iFvM-0006qn-00

        From: Management <mgmt@mycompany.com>

        Date: Mon, 10 Feb 2003 08:37:15 +0100

        Subject: Your raise

        Force: http://mailcleaner/release_mail.php?msg_id=18iFvM-0006qn-00

Based on the sender and the subject, if you determine that the message interests you, simply click on the link following Force:, and the message will be delivered immediately to your mailbox.

False Negatives

A false negative is a spam that manages to slip through MailCleaner and arrive in your mailbox. You can delete it, as you would have before using MailCleaner, but perhaps you would like to alert the MailCleaner Analysis Center to prevent this type of spam from passing in the future.

If you choose to improve MailCleaner for the community of its users, please transmit the illegitimate message to the analysis center at spam@mailcleaner.net. In order to correctly transmit the message, it will not suffice to copy/paste or click on forward. The message must be transmitted as a MIME attachment of type message/rfc822.
The simplest way to do this is to choose Resend or Forward As Attachment.

• In Outlook Express, select the message and, from the Message menu, choose Forward as Attachment.

• In Outlook, Open the message, then, from the Actions menu, choose Resend This Message .... At this point, a warning will appear, explaining that you do not appear to be the original sender of the message. Click on Yes, remove all contents of the To: field and replace them with spam@mailcleaner.net.

• If you use Netscape, you will need to choose As Attachment in the menu at the end of this menu path:

·                Edit ->

·                  Preferences ->

·                    Mail & Newsgroups ->

·                      Messages ->

·                        Forwarding and Replying to messages ->

·                          By default, forward messages:

You can then forward messages to spam@mailcleaner.net.

 

Support

For technical suuport, please e-mail support@mailcleaner.net or call our team directly at +41 21 695 2020.

 

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