Cloudnet Email Firewall

Managing the Quarantine Inbox

The Quarantine Inbox is where the Cloudnet Email Firewall keeps quarantined mail that has been saved for your review. Here's a screen shot showing quarantined messages pending.

The system assigns messages to the Quarantine category that have a high likelihood of being junk mail. But because these messages are quarantined rather than simply discarded, you have the opportunity to make decisions about how to handle them.

Near the top of this screen are several controls that affect the display. The Refresh button is like a browser's refresh or reload button, updating the display to show the current state of the system. The Filter feature lets you limit the display to specific items. The timeline shows you where you are in your Quarantine Inbox. The left and right arrow controls at either end of the timeline allow you to page forward and backwards if there are too many entries for a single page.

Below those controls is a row of five buttons that define various actions that can be applied to messages. You can select one or more messages as targets of the action by clicking the checkbox to the left of each entry, or you can click the checkbox at the top of the column (next to the Date label) to select the entire group. The first three actions are fairly straightforward:

• Deliver -- sends the selected message(s) on to your regular inbox.
• Whitelist -- automatically adds the sender's information to your whitelist.
• Delete -- discards the selected message(s).

These three functions are also available as links in the Actions column for each entry -- you can use these to apply the action to single messages.

It's important to note that the "Deliver" and "Delete" options affect only the current message, not any future messages with the same profile. For example, choosing to have a quarantined message from a particular source delivered will do nothing to change the fact that the next message from that source will probably get quarantined as well, and by the same token deleting a specific message won't stop the next message that comes in from that sender. This just means more work for you. Fortunately there's a better way: taking advantage of the Cloudnet Email Firewall's ability to learn by example.

Normally the Cloudnet Email Firewall applies a series of global tests and each tested message receives a cumulative score that determines how the message will be classified. These tests are reasonable approximations of what most users want, but there is a large gray area in between "spam" and "not spam" and you may find that you don't always agree with the Firewall's decisions. The solution to this problem is to feed the Cloudnet Email Firewall examples of messages you consider to be spam and messages you consider to be valid. This is the purpose of the other two action buttons on this screen:

• Classify as Not Spam -- submits the selected message to the filter engine, which in turn uses its features to classify future similar messages as valid email.
• Classify as Spam -- submits the selected message to the filter engine, which in turn uses its features to classify future messages as spam. These messages are then deleted from your quarantine box.

This is a dynamic system that in effect learns your preferences over time. The more examples you present to the system, the more accurate its tests will become and the number of messages appearing in the Quarantine Inbox will go down. It's important to note that this is not a binary, yes/no decision making process. It is instead "fuzzy" and constantly changing, and whether an individual message is ultimately labeled as [SPAM] or [QUAR] is a function not of any single test but the cumulative effect of all the tests. The "classify" tools are a way to influence the criteria used when these tests are applied. As the system learns your needs it will become, from your perspective, "smarter" and will require less of your time and attention.