Spam filtering of e-mail in WorkgroupMail is provided to enable you to reduce the amount of junk mail that your local users receive. This, in turn, will help reduce the amount of time and resource wasted by your staff in receiving such messages.

WorkgroupMail approaches the task of filtering spam in two different ways:

• It can filter based on the IP address of the originator
• It can filter based on the content of the messages

For each incoming message, WorkgroupMail looks at the originator of the message and the content of the message. If the originator's IP address has been black listed or if the message contains known junk mail phrases (defined by you) then WorkgroupMail considers the message to be junk mail and processes it according to the option you have specified. On encountering a junk message, WorkgroupMail can refuse to accept the message (this does not apply when you receive e-mail via POP3), it can delete the message, it can quarantine the message or it can simply mark the message as spam so that it can be processed appropriately by the content filtering component.

Filtering based on IP address
People who send spam e-mail do so by looking for, and subsequently using, mail servers on the Internet that are not configured to prevent unauthorized users from relaying mail. Such mail servers are referred to as open relays. There are various servers on the Internet that keep a black list of open relay servers. These servers, which are referred to as DNSBL servers, store the IP address of the computer on which the open-relay mail server is running. WorkgroupMail can be configured such that every time a message is received, it checks the originating IP address to see if it is black-listed on any of the RBL servers specified in WorkgroupMail. If it is, WorkgroupMail can reject, quarantine or delete the message, depending on your configuration. Unlike many mail servers, this process works not only when mail is received via SMTP, but also when mail is received via POP3. In the case where a message is received using SMTP, WorkgroupMail looks at the IP address of the connecting SMTP client to determine whether the sender is black listed. In the case where a message is received using POP3, WorkgroupMail will look at the computers that the message passed through before being delivered to WorkgroupMail. If any of the computers are black-listed, the message is considered to be spam.

Filtering based on content
For additional protection, WorkgroupMail lets you specify a set of phrases that are commonly found in junk mail. On encountering any such phrases in the content of any inbound mail messages, WorkgroupMail will mark the message as spam and subsequently reject, delete or quarantine it, according to your preference.

Feature	Home	Professional	Enterprise
Spam filtering