Help

This page explains how to use the various features of Port995 to effectively control your email by blocking unwanted emails and prioritizing your emails so that you can deal with them more effectively. We assume that you have already created some mailboxes and configured your email program to collect them.

Before activating any of these features, remember that there is no way for a computer to infallibly decide which emails you would want and which you would not. All the methods listed here work by looking for specific aspects of emails which suggest they are likely to be unwanted. It is up to you, however, to decide which of these features are suitable for you. Port995 allows you to enable or disable all of it's features and to customize them according to your needs. We cannot guarantee that any of the suggestions on this page will either stop all unwanted email or not block any wanted email.

Now that's out of the way, here are the features:

Avoiding Viruses

Port995 includes a virus-checker based on Grisoft Anti-Virus which is updated every 10 minutes. You can enable this for any of your mailboxes from the Mailboxes page in your control-panel.

Blocking Spam

Spam (or Unsolicited Bulk Email — UBE) is an increasing problem for Internet users. What's more, because of the methods used to send it, it usually costs the recipient more to receive it than it does the sender. Port995's spam-filter can automatically block most spam before it reaches you.

Using the spam-filter is very simple. You can select from various levels of filtering from None through to Highest for each of your mailboxes. Each level of spam protection places increasingly strict checks on the email. For more details on how these work, please see the spam-filter help page.

Blocking Emails From a Specific Source

If you are getting unwanted emails from a specific source such as an individual, company or mailing-list, the best way to stop these is to set up a block. You can block emails according to many different criteria, but the best way is by envelope sender. Create a new block with a rule to “Block emails with envelope sender” and enter the address that the unwanted emails are coming from. You can apply this block to any of your mailboxes from the Mailboxes page in your control panel.

Advanced Options

If you are still receiving unwanted emails, here are some other ideas that can help avoid them:

Using “Tagged” addresses

Since port995 gives you the ability to create as many email addresses as you like, you can afford to give out a different email address to each individual or organization. If you start to receive unsolicited email to that address, you know immediately how they came by your email address and you can easily set up a filter to block those emails.

To start using tagged email addresses, first create a catch-all mailbox for one of your domains. You can forward this to one of your other accounts or simply collect the email directly from it. Now whenever you enter your email address to sign-up for a mailing list or on a web-site, you can use ID@example.com with ID chosen to be a unique name. To keep things simple, you can use the name of the web-site for ID, then you don't need to remember which ID corresponds to which site.

Now, if you start to receive unwanted emails sent to ID@example.com, you can easily set up a block for them by using “Block emails with envelope recipient” and entering ID@example.com.

Filtering Emails

Filters allow you to automatically sort your incoming emails so that you can prioritise them. By filtering “good” emails into a separate folder, you can check that folder for new email as often as you like while checking emails in the mailbox's main INBOX folder only once or twice a day. Some useful strategies for filtering emails include:

Filter emails by “To” header
You can filter all emails which include your email address in their “To” header or “CC” header into your “Good” folder. Most emails from mailing lists do not include your address in the “To” header, and instead use “Undisclosed Recipients:;”.
Filter emails by envelope sender
You can filter emails from email addresses you know into your “Good” folder
Filter emails by “Content-Type” header
Most Unsolicited Commercial Email is sent out in HTML format only. Most email programs which send HTML messages actually send both HTML and plain text versions in the same email rather than only an HTML version. Setting up a filter to catch “emails with header Content-Type: text/html” and filter them into a “Bad” folder will catch a lot of unsolicited emails

By combining the filters above, you can come up with your own recipe for filtering the “good” emails into a separate folder.

The Whitelist

The whitelist is a very effective method of stopping unwanted emails. Unlike all the above methods which require you to keep your blocks or filters up to date, the whitelist moves the burden of maintaining your filters on to the senders of your emails. Of course, some of the senders may not be willing to accept this, so it is important to understand exactly what the whitelist does before you decide to use it.

If someone sends an email to one of your mailboxes which has whitelisting enabled, the email will not immediately appear in the mailbox, but will be queued here on the server. Meanwhile, a “challenge” email will be sent back to the sender asking them to confirm that their address is real. They do this by simply replying to the challenge message and, from then on, any emails from their address will be accepted without challenge.

This stops all unwanted emails which use a false return address as well as most bulk emails whose senders won't respond to the challenge. The recipients of any emails that you send out through the port995 mailserver will automatically be added to your whitelist, and you can manually add addresses at any time. You can also access the queued emails directly if you need to bypass the whitelist for any reason.

For more information on the whitelist, see the separate whitelist HowTo.