• Detailed information regarding configuring,tweaking and general functionality of our spam filtering system can be found here
• Information about the general setup of our email system can be found here
• Information about the setup of different email clients can be found here
• General information about different parts of the mail scanner system can be found here

E-mail FAQ

General

• What are the names of the IMAP and SMTP servers?
• How does my e-mail move through the system?

Procmail

• What is procmail and how do I use it?
• What is the basic format for the rules in the .procmailrc?
• How do I drop all mail coming from a specific address?
• How do I place all mail going to one of my addresses into a folder?
• How do I place all mail with a certain subject into a folder?
• How do I forward messages to someone else and keep a copy?
• What if I want to do more advanced filters?

Maia Mailguard

• What is Maia Mailguard?
• Where can I access the Maia page?
• What is the interface like for Maia?
• How do I control the settings for how mail is handled by Maia?
• What is the whitelist/blacklist?
• What is the quarantine area?
• What is the report spam area?
• How does the spam/ham marking system work?

:0
* [matching expression]
| [command]

OR

:0
* [matching expression]
[location]

:0
* ^From.*joe@example.com
/dev/null

Let's say you have your kent.edu mail forwarded to your departmental mail, but you want to keep it in a seperate folder named KentMail. You would use the following rule to forward mail sent to you through the address joe@kent.edu into your KentMail folder.

:0
* ^To.*joe@kent.edu
| /usr/sbin/dmail +KentMail

:0
* ^Subject.*Colloquium.*
| /usr/sbin/dmail +Announcements

If you want to forward all mail coming from joe@example.com about compilers to jane@network.net and keep a copy that continues to run through your procmail to be delivered to you, you would use the following rule. The c on the first line is an option to keep a copy. You could remove the c to make it an all out forward that does not keep any local copies.

:0 c
* ^From.*joe@example.com
* ^Subject.*compiles.*
! jane@network.net

That would be out of the scope of this simple FAQ. I suggest you read this FAQ, run "man procmailex", or run "man procmail". Those will go into more depth into all that you can do with procmail. If there is a question you think should be added to this fact, please contact systems about the problem, and we will either add it or answer the question on an individual basis.

Maia is the system we use to catch and filter spam and other unwanted e-mails before it is delivered to your mailbox. Everyone has access to their own Maia page which allows them to modify a few options about how it handles their individual e-mail. It can be a very useful tool for reducing the amount of spam that arrives in your inbox, if used regularly.

To access the Maia page, go to www.cs.kent.edu/mail/. There you will be greeted with a login page asking for your e-mail address and password. Use your full e-mail address such as example@cs.kent.edu in the e-mail address box. Then use your standard e-mail password to login.

When logged in, you will be faced with the statistics page showing information about the e-mail you have received. When you use Maia frequently, this page will give you an idea about how much spam and ham (good messages) you are receiving and whether or not it is being caught by Maia. Along the top of the page will be a bar of buttons which are icons to click for different features. If you leave your mouse over a button for a couple seconds, a tooltip will pop-up telling you what the button does. Those areas will be described by the later questions.

The settings button will let you access your options. When you click this button, you will some basic global settings and a list of e-mail addresses you control (which should only be one e-mail address). To get into specific settings for your e-mail address, just click on it on the list. In here, you can change what score you want to set the threshold between spam and ham. It defaults to 5. The lower the number, the better the score as far as the spam system goes. You can also control whether or not spam messsages are even delivered to your mailbox, or possibly even totally thrown away by the system.

Whitelist and blacklist are lists of e-mail addresses that you want the system to treat special no matter how their spam scores would be. Any e-mail address on your whitelist will have all its mail automatically delivered to your inbox without going through any of the filters. Blacklist works the same way, except that it destroys any message from the address.

The quarantine area is where you can look over all messages blocked by Maia, if you set it to quarantine spam in the settings. This is also the area where you can save any messages that were blocked as spam by mistake. It is a good idea to check in here on a regular basis to make sure you are not blocking anything important. Read two answers down on the details of saving messages and reporting spam.

This area is where you can help teach the system about spam messages that got through on accident. It will also get a feel for what are the type of messages you want to keep. Read the next answer to get a little more information on that process.

Basic information about the setup of the Email system for the Kent State University Computer Science Department

Basic information regarding the use of recommended email clients

Basic information regarding the mail scanner