• Contact Info & Hours
• Services

Home › Services › Email › Spam Filter (Meridius)

Last modified Apr 24, 2009 10:39 a.m.

Spam Filter (Meridius)

Meridius is our tool in the fight against virus and spam email in university email accounts. Meridius filters all incoming email, allowing good email through to your inbox and diverting suspected spam to your own personal quarantine.

You will get one email from the Meridius server once per morning (around 4 am) for each day that new spam has arrived, with a link that you can click to check your quarantine online. Bookmark this link (or save a copy of one of these emails) to visit your quarantine at any time.

Quarantine

Your quarantine is where all your suspected spam is stored until it expires (after 8 days). If you know your account info, you can login to your quarantine here. There you can:

• Click on each email to see the message contents (without images).
• “Release” any message from your quarantine to send it to your email inbox.
• “Release & Always Allow” to whitelist a message.
• “Delete” any message from your quarantine.
• “Delete & Always Block” to blacklist a message.

Whitelist

Your whitelist is your personal sender approval list. It is a list of email addresses (or entire domains), that you want to get through Meridius. To add to this list, just click on the “Filter” tab near the upper right of your quarantine page. Once there, look for the textbox field at the upper left of the page. Type the email addresses, user names or domain names that you want to manually whitelist, then click “Allow.” To remove someone from this list, check the box next to their email address, user name or domain name, then click “Delete.”

Blacklist

Your blacklist is your personal sender denial list. It is a list of email addresses (or entire domains), that you want to get blocked by Meridius. To add to this list, just click on the “Filter” tab near the upper right of your quarantine page. Once there, look for the textbox field at the upper left of the page. Type the email addresses, user names or domain names that you want to manually whitelist, then click “Block.” To remove someone from this list, check the box next to their email address, user name or domain name, then click “Delete.”

Q&A

Meridius

1. How does Meridius work?

   Meridius uses a unique, multi-layered strategy to filter the good email from the bad. As email comes into the Meridius Security Gateway it is filtered through the following layers for maximum security and spam defense:

   1. checked against pre-defined policies,
   2. checked against Real Time Blackhole Lists (RBLs),
   3. scanned for viruses,
   4. checked for illegal or infected message attachments,
   5. checked against user-configured and system-wide whitelists and blocklists,
   6. and finally, checked against Meridius’ “Recurrent Pattern Detection” engine and additional text analyses.

   It lets the desirable email pass through to your email account, and diverts the suspected yucky stuff into your own personal spam quarantine.

   It will send you one email per day if it has filtered anything into your quarantine. You can then view, delete, or release those email messages back into your mailbox (if it’s the real deal).

2. How do I whitelist strange (or random) addresses?

   In these cases you may need to manually whitelist the actual FROM: address and not just the REPLY-TO: address because the REPLY-TO: address is going to be the one that you see in your short email header (and which is different or random every time) and may be the one that Meridius is trying to whitelist upon.

   For example, when I look at one of these pieces of mail (from within my quarantine) that I want to keep and whitelist, the header looks like this: If I told Meridius to “Whitelist & Release” this message, Meridius would place “bounce-927623-28369618@list.novell.com” in my whitelist. But that won’t allow future messages through because that’s not really the FROM: address.

   If you click on the little magnifying glass next to the FROM: line on your quarantined message, you’ll see the following:

   Now you see that the top line of the header says FROM: “Novell Training Services” (technical.training@novell.com). This is the email address that you would want to place in your whitelist, and you would need to do this manually by clicking on the “Whitelist” tab near the upper right of your quarantine page. Once there, look for the whitelist field at the upper left of the page. Type the email addresses, user names or domain names (@novell.com) that you want to manually whitelist, then click “Add.”

3. How does Meridius deal with users with multiple email addresses?

   Meridius will automatically create a quarantine mailbox for each email ‘address’ to which an email is sent. For example: if a user has an email address of john.smith@biola.edu and an alias of john.q.smith@biola.edu, spam messages sent to either address will create an individual quarantine mailbox for each corresponding address.

4. How can I disable Meridius from filtering my email?

   If you’d like to disable Meridius spam filtering for your email address, this is possible by creating a wildcard statement in your filter. You do this by logging into your Meridius filter and creating a whitelist entry. In the entry you will enter an asterisk(*) instead of an email address or domain to whitelist and click “Allow”. This rule will be interpreted by Meridius as instruction to allow all email through to your inbox.