The purpose of the spamfilter is to mark, filter and delete unsolicited advertisements and malicious e-mails.
Do I need to change any defaults?
If you are using the webmail or IMAPS and you are satisfied
( you do not loss any e-mail and you do not receive too many spams )
the default values are right.
If you download your e-mails using POP3, we recommend you to turn off
the Move option (You can do this by pressing the [áthelyezés ki] button at
the "ÁTHELYEZÉSI PONTSZÁM" section), or to raise the score, because the
POP3 clients download the Inbox folder only, so you will not be able to
see your e-mails which were sent to the SPAM folder (so in case you wait
for a letter, you can not check if it have been moved to the Spam folder).
Note: We do recommend the use of IMAPS instead of POP3.
We filter messages for recipients whose e-mails end in @gamma.ttk.pte.hu,
@fizika.ttk.pte.hu, @ttk.pte.hu, and @whitehouse.ttk.pte.hu.
We do not filter messages with ending @novell.ttk.pte.hu, so these
users need to filter the messages locally. We do not filter messages coming from the Rector's Office, and e-mails
coming from the Faculty of Sciences either
( but the whitelist, the blacklist, and the singular* work on both ).
The Score (Pontszám - in Hungarian)
states how much have the spamfilter found the message spam-like.
The higher the value of a message is, the more likely it is a spam.
You can check a message's Score in the webmail under the link "All headers",
at the row "X-Spam-Status:" after the "score=" statement (if the mail got a score).
There are 3 adjustable actions in the Hercules spamfilter ( you can combine these settings):
mark (jelölés - in Hungarian): marks the letter adding "H-SPAM" to it's Subject.
move (áthelyezés - in Hungarian): moves the letter to the "spam" folder.
delete (törlés - in Hungarian): deletes the letter irreversibly.
All of the three actions can be turned on/off, and the scores corresponding to
the actions can be changed too. The actions take place on a letter if the
e-mail's Score reaches or exceeds the corresponding scores.
Therefore the lower score means strong filtering, and the higher score means poor filtering!
You can turn on/off the complete spam filtering by pressing the button
[spamszűrő kikapcsolása] on the left of the top corner on the filtering page.
When the filtering is turned off the user receives every e-mails unfiltered
( except the mails filtered by singular* ),
none of the blacklist or whitelist works in this case (This is not recommended!).
Blacklist and whitelist
By setting the scores appropriately we avoid reading too many spams,
and we still receive all important e-mails. But sometimes it may occur
that for some reason the filtering system gives a very high score for a
non-spam e-mail. In these cases we could receive these letters with raising
the mark/move/delete scores, but we would also let lots of spams slip in.
This is when the whitelist comes handy. By adding the senders e-mail address
to the whitelist we can tell the spamfiltering system not to perform any of
the actions on the letters coming from the addresses on the whitelist.
Note: we only do recommend adding an address to the whitelist if the
letters are upscored by mistake. The spamsenders may temper with their
e-mails' sender information so if they use addresses we had whitelisted,
the filtering system will not be able to filter their messages either.
The blacklist is just the opposit of the whitelist. Spammers whose letters
have not been scored high enough or sended by a citizen within the Faculty
of Sciences or the University. should be add to the blacklist.
The "helyfoglalási adatok" section shows how much disk space
is available, and how much are we using at the moment ( it can be checked
in the webmail too).
Why are there separate actions for marking and moving?
Clients using POP3S can download their e-mails from the Inbox folder only, so
they would not receive the letters moved to the spam folder.
At the same time for people who use webmail or IMAPS it is more practical not
to mix real messages with spams. By using the spamfilter's settings page
everybody has a choice to set the spamfiltering system as they please.
Score values
Normal letters rarely reach the scores set as defaults.
In practice even the roughest spam does not reach 100 scores - we have only met
such during tests ( which means that the deletions rule is
ineffective if the score is left on the default value - it is almost like
we would have turned it off ).
As you can see we were intend to stay on the safe side when
setting the defaults.
Forwarding
When the forwarding is set in the openwebmail the traffic goes through
spamfiltering too. This appears on the spamfilter settings page at the
"newforward" field ( you can set the forwarding on the webmail's
settings page ).
For forwardings requested to outer addresses, without having active accounts,
the spamfiltering is ineffective. In these cases we recommend the filtering to
be done on the destination side.
"Vacation" (automatic answers)
The vacation setting is not applicable any more on the openwebmail's settings
page, because the spammers always abused it.
The Computing Centre generally doesn't recommend the usage of it, because:
- the system replies to spam mails too, so the spammers will realise that
the address is live, and they send more spam.
- in some cases the vacation can cause "loops", for example if we are on
a mailing list which atomatically accepts mails from us, the automatic
reply function reach the mailing list, comes back, and the reply function
react again, and so on... and all the list members will receive our
periodically repeating e-mails.
Anyway, here at the bottom of the spamfilter's personal settings page
you can set a vacation message.
If you have further questions, please don't hesitate to
contact us.
*the singular system is filtering all
incoming messages. Generally it relies on our own mailing statistics, and
deletes mails coming from known spammers. These letters are not reach
the user, but the sender gets a standard error message about that, with a
link, where he can ask us to remove him from the blocking list (
the singular database contains mainly scammers ).
