When your first email message is quarantined, you will receive an email from the Palomar Firewall with instructions on accessing your personal quarantine area to review your email messages for spam.  If you accidentally deleted the email, you may visit https://mailex.palomar.edu and request a new email be sent to you.  Just enter your full email address as your login.  Then click Create New Password.

After receipt of the report, log into the Quarantine interface by clicking on the "click here" at the bottom of the report and follow the instructions for FAQ # 10. How can I manage my quarantine inbox?

After an email message goes through its layers of tests, the SPAM Firewall assigns it a spam probability number.  If the firewall is 100% sure the email message is spam, it will be blocked.  You'll never see blocked messages so you won't have to waste your time sifting through these spam messages.  When the firewall is about 50%-99% sure a message is spam, it will quarantine the message.  Quarantined messages are saved on the Barracuda firewall for your review.  If the firewall is less than 50% sure a message is spam, it will tag the message by adding "[BULK]" to the subject line and deliver the message.  A good example of an uncertain message might be an email from Amazon.  The Barracuda sometimes has a difficult time knowing whether an email from Amazon.com is a receipt of purchase or an advertisement.

Whitelists are lists of email addresses you always want to receive email from.  Email that you "whitelist" does not get tested for spam although it will be scanned for viruses.  You might, for example, whitelist a company you conduct business with if you want to receive their regular advertisements and not worry about the Barracuda quarantining messages from them.  Tip: It isn't recommended to whitelist palomar.edu.  While the Barracuda will give special consideration to email from Palomar, spammers often use fake palomar.edu email addresses hoping to bypass spam filters.  They won't bypass our filters by faking their address, but they will bypass yours if you whitelist palomar.edu.

Conversely, blacklists are lists of email addresses you never want to receive email from.  Email that you "blacklist" is automatically blocked whether or not it is spam.  On rare occasion, the firewall might not catch spam messages from a particular sender.  In this case you could blacklist the email sender.  Blacklisting is not always effective because not only do many spam senders fake their email address, they will often change their email address after they spam a bunch of people.

To add/delete email addresses from your personal whitelists and/or blacklists, visit the quarantine and click the Preferences Tab.  Then click on the Whitelist/Blacklist sub-tab.  See the figure below for more information.

 

Tips on specifying addresses

When adding addresses to your whitelist and blacklist, note the following tips:

• If you enter a full email address, such as johndoe@yahoo.com, just that user is specified. If you enter just a domain, such as yahoo.com, all users in that domain are specified.

• If you enter a domain such as hp.com, all subdomains are also included, such as support.hp.com and store.dell.com

• Mass mailings often come from domains that do not resemble the company’s Web site name. For example, you may want to receive mailings from historybookclub.com, but you will find that this site sends out its mailing from the domain hbcfyi.com. Examine the From: address of an actual mailing that you are trying to whitelist or blacklist to determine what to enter.

If the Barracuda SPAM Firewall blocks a message someone sends to you, they will automatically be notified by email that the message was blocked.  A "false-positive" where legitimate email is mistakenly blocked, is extremely rare.

Yes!  Logon to the quarantine area. Once inside the quarantine, go to Preferences -> SPAM Filter Enable/Disable.  From there, you can disable the spam filter.

The Barracuda will automatically quarantine messages that have attachments containing executables for security reasons.  These are the attachments that can execute or run on your computer potentially causing the most problems.  Although every attempt is made to scan for viruses at the campus level, department level, and at the computer, new viruses appear all the time that may not be detected.  The extra step of visiting the quarantine will help ensure that you choose to accept the message before it is delivered to your inbox.  From the quarantine, simply click "deliver" and the message will be delivered.

Yes!  If you find the quarantine inconvenient, you can disable it.  Email messages will still be scanned for spam likelihood.  Messages that are 100% spam will be blocked.  Messages that would ordinarily be quarantined,  would instead be delivered to your inbox with "[SPAM?]" added to the subject line.

The Spam Quarantine messages go to your Junk email folder because your Junk email options are set to either High or Safe List Only. In order to prevent this from happening you need to change the settings to Low or No Automatic Filtering.

After logging into the quarantine interface, select the QUARANTINE INBOX tab to view a list of your quarantined messages.

The Spam firewall as a learning engine that learns how to deal with future messages based on the ones you classify as spam and not spam. The learning engine becomes more effective over time as you teach the system how to classify messages and as you set up rules based on your whitelist and blacklist.

The image shows an example of the QUARANTINE INBOX.

The following table describes the actions you can perform from this page.

 

Action	Description
Deliver	Delivers the selected message to your standard email inbox. Note: If you want to classify a message or add it to your whitelist, make sure to do so before delivering the message to your inbox. Once the Barracuda Spam Firewall delivers a message, it is removed from your quarantine list.
Whitelist	Adds the selected message to your whitelist so all future emails from this sender are not quarantined unless the message contains a virus or banned attachment type. The Barracuda Spam Firewall adds the sending email address exactly as it appears in the message to your personal whitelist. Note that some commercial mailings may come from one of several servers such as mail3.abcbank.com, and a subsequent message may come from mail2.abcbank.com. See the section on managing your whitelists and blacklists for tips on specifying whitelists with greater effectiveness.
Delete	Deletes the selected message from your quarantine list. The main reason to delete messages is to help you keep track of which quarantine messages you have reviewed. You cannot recover messages you have deleted.
Classify as Not Spam	Classifies the selected message as not spam. Note: Some bulk commercial email may be considered useful by some users and spam by others. Instead of classifying bulk commercial email, it may be more effective to add it to your whitelist (if you wish to receive such messages) or blacklist (if you prefer not to receive them).
Classify as Spam	Classifies the selected message as spam.

Please check out your "Junk E-mail" folder.