Quarantine Area

Authors Note: If you have not already, I would suggest you first read the Spam Filtering Overview page before proceeding.

This is really not a standard email folder or directory. It is more like a "holding cell" for those bad emails. Bad emails are those that received a high spam score, were identified to contain viruses, or identified as a phishing scheme. With the quarantined area not being a standard folder, it will not count against your email quota.

Using The Quarantine Area

To get to those emails that have been marked for quarantine, you click on Quarantine in the top menu. While in the quarantine area, you have 3 basic actions. Each of these actions can be found in the dropdown box near the top of the page. To execute these action, you simple mark the email(s), choose the action, and press the "submit" button to the right of the dropdown box.

DELETE: This will permanently remove any marked emails from the quarantined area.
Release: This will move email out of the quarantined area, and then put it into your inbox so you can read it. Note that this does not change the label of the email to "good mail", nor will it prevent future emails from the same sender from landing in the quarantined area. It will simply put the email in your inbox so you can review it. See the Personal Configuration section for details about how to change what emails land in the quarantined area.
Release + Add To Whitelist: As noted above, this will move the email into your inbox so you can review it. This option will also add the sender to your whitelist. Adding a user to your whitelist will prevent any future emails from that user's email being marked as spam.

Personal Configuration

Each user can fine-tune their spam filtering to meet their own email usage. Configuration is done on the SpamAssassin Configuration page. Users get to this page by clicking on Options in the top menu. You can also access the SpamAssassin Configuration area if you click on the link that says "Spam Assassin Settings" while inside the Quarantine area.

Whitelisting/Blacklisting:

Whitelisting is a way to make sure that any email from a given user gets through the filtering, no matter what they send. Blacklisting is the opposite, a way to make sure that email from a given user is always filtered away as spam, no matter what the SpamAssassin score. When setting a whitelist/blacklist email address you must assign a priority. As a basic rule of thumb, you will want all your whitelist entries to have a higher priority then your blacklist priorities.

Quarantine Settings:

These three settings are used to set your desired policy for anything that becomes quarantined. See the Special Folders section for more details about the quarantine folder.

The first option will set how often you are sent an email notifying you that their is a message(s) in your quarantined area. You do have an option to turn this off, be we suggest that you do not. Any time you have email that is quarantined, you should check to make sure it was not mistakenly marked. If so, you should use the Release + Whitelist option noted above.

The second option will set how long an email will stay in the quarantined area. We suggest that this option should be set at a higher time frame then your report option. Otherwise email could be deleted from the quarantined area before you have a chance to know that it is there.

The final option, to Quarantine or Reject, will not result in any changes. We have disabled this on the server level for security reasons. We ask that you keep it on the default setting of Quarantine at this time.

Message Scoring Policy:

As noted earlier, every email is scanned by SpamAssassin and given a score based on it similarity to known spam. The higher the score an email receives, the more likely it is a spam message. Setting the score policy will define what happens to these messages. You can set the two numbers here that will basically define 3 categories of email: good mail, "iffy" mail, and bad mail.

Good Mail: Any email that has a score below the Tag Level value will be considered "good" mail, and will land in your inbox untouched.
"Iffy" Mail: Any email that has a score equal to or greater then the Tag Level value, but less then the Quarantine Level value will be considered "iffy" mail. It will still land in your inbox, but will be have the subject changed to flag it as potential spam. The subject line will now begin with [***SPAM***], followed by the original subject.
Bad Mail: Any email that has a score equal to or greater then the Quarantine Level will be considered "bad" email, and will be sent to Quarantine. It will not go into your inbox. More information about the Quarantine location can be found in the Special Folders section.

There are a number of different preset options here that you may choose, but the default setting is probably a good place to start. As you review the "iffy" messages that get through, and as you build up your whitelist, you will find that you can begin lowering these numbers. (We strongly suggest against having a tag level lower then 3. If you find that you need to go that low, please see the Spam Folder Overview page.) During your review process, it may be helpful to know what score SpamAssassin assigned the email. The easiest way to do this is to add X-Spam-Score to the list of Headers that you wish to see. This way, when you are reading an email, the score will be displayed in the header area along with the Subject, From, Date, etc. To add X-Spam-Score to the list of displayed headers:

Click on Options in the top menu.
Click on Display Preferences
Add X-Spam-Score: in the box that is labeled "Show Headers". Make sure that you include the colon, and you use the same capitalization.
Press the "Submit" button at the bottom of the page.

For example, if you begin to notice that all the mail that lands in your inbox tagged as [***SPAM***] is truly spam, then you can lower the Tag Level down a point or two, and lower the Quarantine Level down to your old Tag Level. This would change all that old "iffy" mail into "bad" mail and keep it out of your inbox. Lowering the Tag Level will result in tagging more email as spam, but you have to be careful that it is not so low that you are tagging good email. More information can be found about tagging can be found on the Spam Folder page.