Crossover Consulting: Travel Industry Website Design, Hosting & Marketing

Simply said, Mailscanner directs the efforts of a suite of mail management tools that we have configured on our network. Since all of our clients are from travel industry, we’ve configured our servers specifically to allow certain suppliers’ mail through, and reject spam, phishing and viruses. It’s an ongoing battle and requires a lot of effort, but in a nutshell here’s how our programs work:

Mailserver receives an email and sends it on to SpamAssassin. SpamAssassin does the bulk of the work and assigns the mail a score. First, it checks to see if the sender is on a whitelist. If so, it stops there and forwards it on. This is why we suggest that whitelists are used sparingly. Sometimes good senders can send bad mail. If they are whitelisted, our system won’t check them past this point. There are two whitelists: server-wide (which includes known cruise and tour suppliers) and domains. Domain whitelists are for your own use and how-to is covered here.

If the sender isn’t whitelisted, then SpamAssassin continues checking the header, content and signature of the email against a long set of rules, which we update hourly - FYI, some webhosts only update monthly! Each rule violation adds to the score. Some rules have negative (good) scores.

Within SpamAssassin are other programs that compute checksums/signatures of a message, and determine how many times this checksum (message) has been seen. If a message has been seen around 10,000 times, it is very likely to be a mass-mailing. They increase the SpamAssassin score accordingly.

Once the mail is scored, there are a couple of labels that could be attached to the subject line:

* {Disarmed} - indicates that the email contained html tags that are considered dangerous, e.g. iframe and form tags
* {Virus?} - indicates that the email contained a virus and has had the attachment removed.
* {Filename?} - indicates that the email contained a dangerous file attachment which has been removed.
* {Fraud?} - indicates the e-mail may be fraudulent or designed to collect personal information from you.
* {Spam?} - indicates that the email is likely to be spam - you should filter these emails into a separate folder in your email client. Score of 5-19
* {Definitely Spam?} - indicates that the email is almost definitely spam because it got a very high detection score Score of 20 and higher

By default, we deliver ALL mail. You can decide exactly how to handle the mail with one of two options:

1. Filter email to folders using Outlook/Outlook Express, Eudora, Gmail or Thunderbird.
2. Login to your control panel and change the settings to delete or re-route the email. Instructions are found here