Spam Quarantine

This quarantine process prevents damage by stopping these emails before they can get to your inbox. It also catches phishing attempts, which constitute much of the spam encountered by Suffolk University students, faculty and staff.

Reviewing Possible Spam

Rather than posting spam to a Junk Mail folder, the system generates a Spam Quarantine Notice--an email digest of messages have been identified as possible spam. These notices are generated at 6 a.m., 9 a.m., 12 p.m., and 3 p.m. daily. You will only receive a notice if spam has been identified for your email account.

The quarantine system holds these possible spam messages for 14 days, and then it deletes them automatically. Once a message has been deleted, it cannot be retrieved.

Still, some junk mail will escape detection and appear in your email inbox.

The safest way to treat spam that escapes even the most sophisticated forms of protection is to not even open it. When you see a message that is clearly spam, just drag and drop the email from your inbox to the Junk Email folder.

You can protect yourself, your colleagues, and the university by becoming familiar with the Suffolk University Spam Quarantine.

Spam Quarantine Notice

Suffolk University’s Spam Quarantine is a web server that stores and provides access to your spam email messages. It will allow you to easily review your messages and, in the rare event of a false positive--a message incorrectly marked as spam--it will provide a link to immediately release the message to your inbox.

Details of the Suffolk Spam notification

The Suffolk Spam Quarantine Notification is an email message sent to you by the quarantine system listing any spam messages received since your last notification. Notifications are delivered to your inbox daily.

The notification has several parts:

  1. General instructions about the notification.
  2. A link to the web interface of the Suffolk University Spam Quarantine. (This will take you to a web page that displays all of the held messages.)
  3. A list of the messages that have been marked as spam. (Each row represents a single message, displaying the sender, subject and date of the message.)

To release a message that is not spam, click on the Not Spam link to immediately release the message. It will be delivered to your inbox as normal.

The subject of each message is a link that will display the individual message in the spam quarantine web interface. Note that viewing the spam in this manner will not release it to your inbox.

Using the Spam Quarantine Interface

When you click on the links for Your Email Quarantine or View All Quarantine Messages in the Spam Quarantine Notification, you are taken to a web page that allows you to view, delete or release spam messages.

The interface has a number of features to let you manage the messages stored:

  1. List of all messages.
  2. Not Spam button. (When active, click to release the selected messages to your inbox.)
  3. Delete button. (When active, click to permanently delete the selected messages.)
  4. A check box next to each message in the list. (Selecting a check box activates the Not Spam and Delete buttons.)
  5. A search box that will allow you to search messages by sender or subject. (The Advanced Search link allows you to search with more criteria including a date range.)
  6. Navigation tools allow you to jump to other messages and display more per page, if there are more than 25 messages in the quarantine.

Spam Quarantine Detail Page

When you click on the subject of a message in the Spam Quarantine Notification or in the Spam Quarantine Web Interface, details of the message are displayed. The message display has several parts:

  1. Not Spam and Delete buttons, which will release the message or permanently delete it, respectively.
  2. Sender and Recipient details.
  3. Message content. For security reasons, only a portion of the message body is displayed in plain text. This prevents the message from using malicious content to harm your computer. (To display the full contents of the message in its original form you must release the message with the Not Spam button.)

Hints and Tips

  • The Suffolk University Spam Quarantine notifications are generated at 6 a.m., 9 a.m., 12 p.m., and 3 p.m. daily.
  • At times, you may not receive any spam notifications.
  • The system will not send a notification, if no spam messages have been received since the previous notification. You may receive a notification email one or more times a day.
  • You may also receive multiple notifications. If you have or use more than one email address, you may receive notifications for each of these email addresses.
  • You can keep old notification emails, and use them to manage spam messages. Any notification can be used to manage messages, or to navigate to the spam quarantine web interface, by clicking on the Your Email Quarantine or the View All Quarantined Messages link.
  • You do not need to delete spam. The system will automatically delete older messages, typically those older than 14 days.
  • You will not receive notification of messages that have been listed in a prior notification.
  • If a spam message is delivered to a mailing list address, the notification will be delivered to all the email addresses on that mailing list, and any user with the notification can release or delete the message. Once a message has been deleted, you cannot release it.

Personalizing Your Spam Quarantine Filters

You can create safelists to ensure that messages from specified senders are never treated as spam, and you can use blocklists to ensure that messages from specified senders are always treated as spam.

For example, you might receive unwanted email from a mailing list. You can add this sender to your blocklist to prevent email messages from the sender from being delivered.

On the other hand, you might find that email messages from a legitimate sender, that should not be treated as spam, are sent to the Suffolk University Spam Quarantine. To prevent mail from that sender from being quarantined, you can add the sender to your safelist.

Accessing Safelists and Blocklists

To access safelists and blocklists, click on the link in your notification email.

Adding Entries to Safelists and Blocklists

Entries can be added to safelists and blocklists using these formats:

You can't add a sender or domain to both your safelist and your blocklist at the same time. However, if you add a domain to a safelist and a user in that domain to the blocklist (or vice versa), the system applies both rules. For example, if you add example.com to the safelist, and add [email protected] to the blocklist, the Suffolk University Spam Quarantine delivers all mail from example.com without scanning for spam, but it treats mail from [email protected] as spam.

You can't allow or block a range of subdomains using this syntax: .domain.com. You can, however, explicitly block a specific domain using this syntax: server.domain.com.

Working With Safelists

Adding senders to your Safelist

You can add senders to your safelist in two ways. From the Suffolk University Spam Quarantine, you can manually add a sender to the safelist by clicking the Options menu in the upper-right corner of the screen and then selecting Safelist. You can add an email address or domain to the list, and click Add to List.

Note: Email addresses or links added to this list will not be identified as spam.

You can also add senders to the safelist if the message has been sent to the Suffolk University Spam Quarantine. If the message from a particular sender is held in the Suffolk University Spam Quarantine, you can select the check box next to the message, and choose Release and Add to Safelist from the drop-down menu.

The sender and the header for the specified mail are both added to the safelist, and the released messages proceed directly to the destination queue.

You can also use the spam notification message to release messages. Click the link to release a particular message. You have the option to add senders to your safelist.

Working With Blocklists

Adding Senders to your Blocklist

You can use a blocklist to prevent the delivery of mail from specified senders. To add senders to your blocklist, select Options, and then Blocklist from your quarantine.

Email addresses or domains added to this list will always be identified as spam.

From your quarantine, you can also enter an email address or domain in the field, and click Add to List.

When the Suffolk University Spam Quarantine servers receive mail from an email address or domain that matches an entry in your blocklist, it treats the mail as spam. The mail might be deleted or quarantined, depending on the blocklist action setting.