Antair Spam Filter™ Manual
version 4.3.2
January 15th, 2012
Contents
Overview
Antair Spam Filter installs as a standard BlackBerry application, and operates silently in the background. The software monitors your BlackBerry email inbox and eliminates incoming junk mail and spam. Antair Spam Filter eliminates both email and SMS spam. All email accounts on the BlackBerry device are monitored, including corporate (BES) email accounts, and personal (BIS) email accounts.
When an email or SMS message arrives to your BlackBerry, it is analyzed by Antair Spam Filter. If the message is spam, it is filtered from the inbox and retained in the Antair Spam Filter Spam Box for review.
Antair Spam Filter is designed to work out of the box without the need for any setup. At the same time, Antair Spam Filter is highly customizable, allowing you to fine-tune the product to suit your specific needs.
Spam Box
Recently filtered spam messages are retained in the Antair Spam Filter Spam Box. You can review these messages at any time. If you find that an email has been filtered by mistake, you can restore it back into your inbox. The Spam Box also contains filtered SMS messages.
When reviewing a filtered message, the Spam Box will show you all of the details of the message, such as the sender's email address and the contents of the message. It will also show you the reason why the message was filtered.
If you choose to restore an email message back into the inbox, Antair Spam Filter will automatically place the sender's email address into the Address Whitelist, making sure that future correspondences from that sender are not filtered. This behavior is configurable through the Antair Spam Filter Settings screen.
While the Spam Box retains a limited number of recently filtered messages (500, as a default) it is self-recycling, automatically pruning the oldest messages to make room for newly filtered messages without any maintenance on your part.
To make sure your SPAM messages are filtered/deleted on both your device and the mail server (eg. Outlook, Web email services ) do the following:
On your device, open the Messages application.
From the menu, choose Options, and then select Email Reconciliation.
Select Wireless Reconcile. Click the trackball and select On to activate wireless reconciliation, or Off to deactivate.
Scroll up one line to "Delete On:" and click the trackball to change the option, and select Mailbox & Handheld.
Scroll down to "On Conflicts" and click the trackball to change the option, and select Handheld Wins.
Addresses
Antair Spam Filter allows you to whitelist or blacklist specific email addresses.
When an email or SMS arrives from a whitelisted email address, it is automatically considered safe by Antair Spam Filter, and is not filtered. If the sender's email address is blacklisted, and none of your other custom settings indicate that the message should be safe, the message will be automatically filtered.
When Antair Spam Filter evaluates an incoming email or SMS message, the address whitelist is always consulted first. If the email address of the sender appears in this list, the message is allowed to remain in the BlackBerry inbox regardless of its contents.
Your personal BlackBerry address book contacts are automatically considered safe. When you receive an email from one of your BlackBerry contacts, the message will not be treated as spam. This behavior is configurable through the Antair Spam Filter Settings screen.
Domains
Antair Spam Filter allows you to whitelist or blacklist an entire domain. An email domain is the suffix of the email address pertaining to the company of the sender, or the provider of the email account, i.e. hotmail.com or antair.com.
When an email arrives from a whitelisted domain, it is automatically considered safe by Antair Spam Filter, and is not filtered. If the sender's domain is blacklisted, and none of your other custom settings indicate that the email should be safe, the email will be automatically filtered.
Entering your company domain into the domain whitelist is a great way to ensure that none of the email from your colleagues is accidentally filtered, regardless of content.
Domains are treated as proper suffixes of the sender's email address. This means that if you have the domain mycompany.com whitelisted, email arriving from anyone@accounting.mycompany.com, anyone@hr.mycompany.com, as well as anyone@mycompany.com will all be considered safe, and will not be filtered.
Terms
Antair Spam Filter allows you to whitelist or blacklist terms, words, and phrases.
If you place a term into the whitelist, then any incoming email or SMS message containing that term will be considered safe, and will not be filtered. For example, placing the term 'monthly report' into the term whitelist will prevent any message that contains that phrase in its body from being filtered. Likewise, an email or SMS message containing a blacklisted term or phrase will be filtered automatically unless one of your other settings indicates that the email should not be filtered.
Antair Spam Filter considers and analyzes terms that are found both in the subject line of the email message, as well as in the body. Terms that are composed entirely of numeric digits are not considered or analyzed.
Server Tags
Certain mail servers have the ability to run their own spam filters against incoming email. When the mail server determines that an email message is spam, it can tag the subject of that email message with a spam tag before delivering the message to your BlackBerry device.
For example, when a message with the subject line 'Win $1 Million Now' arrives on the mail server, the server-side spam filter may determine that the message is spam. If the server-side spam program is configured to attach a spam tag to the message subject line, what arrives into your BlackBerry may, in fact, be '!{spam}! Win $1 Million Now'.
Antair BlackBerry Spam Filter can take advantage of these server side spam tags. If your mail server has the ability to tag spam messages, enter the server spam tag into the server tag blacklist. This ensures that any incoming message containing the server tag will be automatically filtered.
Antair Spam Filter also gives you the ability to whitelist server tags. While most mail servers tag subject lines for purposes of identifying spam messages, whitelisting a server tag allows Antair Spam Filter to be influenced by mail servers configured with custom email tagging rules.
Spoofed Addresses
Email spoofing is a common type of spamming technique where spam arrives to your inbox from what seems to be your own email address, or from an email address of a friend or colleague. Obviously, you did not send spam to yourself, and it's unlikely that the spam was sent by someone you know. Most likely, the spammer modified the spam message to make it look like the email was sent from you or someone you know. Spammers do this to circumvent spam filters. Antair Spam Filter gives you the tools to fight this type of spam.
Let's say your email address is yourname@yourcompany.com. If you receive spam from that email address, the spammer is spoofing your email address. One way to fight this is to add yourname@yourcompany.com to your address blacklist. This will work, but then any legitimate email that you send to yourself will be automatically filtered. In addition, yourname@yourcompany.com is probably an entry in your BlackBerry address book, and this means that yourname@yourcompany.com is automatically whitelisted, and messages from yourname@yourcompany.com will always be considered safe, regardless of whether they are actually sent by you, or if they are the spoofed spam messages sent by the spammer. This is probably not what you want.
What you can do is enter yourname@yourcompany.com into the Spoofed Address list.
Messages sent from email addresses that are in the Spoofed Address list are presumed to be spoofed spam messages, and are automatically filtered. But what if you send email to yourself from that email address? You would not want those messages to be automatically filtered. For this reason, every email address in the Spoofed Address list can be linked to SafeText terms or phrases.
SafeText is a term or phrase that identify you as you in an email message. So, for example, if yourname@yourcompany.com is your email address, and you placed that address into the Spoofed Address list in order to prevent spoofed spam from coming into your inbox, you can assign your email signature line as the SafeText for yourname@yourcompany.com. This way, when you send an email to yourself from yourname@yourcompany.com, your signature will be in the email, and that message will be considered safe. But when the spammer spoofs yourname@yourcompany.com and sends you spam, that message will not contain your email signature, and that email will be automatically filtered, since the address is in the Spoofed Address list, and the email does not contain the SafeText you assigned to that address.
SafeText items can be any term or phrase that would identify the email as coming from you. You can assign any number of SafeText items to a given Spoofed Address entry.
Analytical Engine
The underlying technology responsible for analyzing incoming messages is the Antair Spam Filter Analytical engine. While the engine is largely autonomous, you can change the strength of the analytical engine in the Settings screen of Antair Spam Filter.
While each of the 10 available strength values has a description that indicates the strength of a given setting, two of the strength values are special. Setting the strength of the analytical engine to zero has the effect of, essentially, turning off the analytical engine. Under this setting, unless the email can be determined to be spam from your specific whitelist or blacklist entries, it is left alone and not analyzed at all. Setting the analytical engine strength to a value of ten, has the value of treating every piece of incoming email as spam. With the analytical engine strength set to ten, each incoming mail message will be filtered automatically unless it contains something that matches one of your custom whitelist entries, such as a whitelisted term.
Locale Engine
In addition to the general underlying analytical engine that analyzes the contents of incoming email, Antair Spam Filter contains a Locale Engine, the sole purpose of which is to fight foreign-language (non-English) spam.
The Locale Engine strength settings can be found in the Antair Spam Filter Settings screen. Depending on which strength setting you choose, the Locale Engine will advise Antair Spam Filter to what extent to treat email containing non-English content as spam. If you receive a lot of foreign language (non-English) spam, set the Locale Engine strength value higher.
SMS Messages
Antair Spam Filter has the capability to analyze and filter spam that arrives in the form of SMS text messages.
SMS messages are analyzed through the same powerful analytical engines as standard email messages. And, if filtered, SMS messages appear in the Spam Box alongside filtered email messages.
Your email address and term whitelists and blacklists are considered during analysis of SMS messages as well as standard email messages. In addition, Antair Spam Filter allows you to whitelist or blacklist specific SMS numbers.
If you don't want Antair Spam Filter to analyze and filter SMS spam, you can use the settings screen to specify that all SMS messages should be considered to be safe.
PIN Messages
PIN messages are similar to email messages, except that instead of sending an email message from an email address to another email address, PIN messages are sent from a BlackBerry device directly to another BlackBerry device by entering the unique BlackBerry PIN.
In general, PIN messages are analyzed and treated the same way that email messages are treated by Antair Spam Filter. However, since PIN messages are not as prone to being spam as email messages, you can use the Antair Spam Filter Settings screen to indicate that you want PIN messages to always be considered safe.
Alerts & Notifications
Your active BlackBerry profile dictates the kind of alert you get when a new email message arrives into your inbox. Using built-in BlackBerry profile management, you can specify whether you want to hear a sound effect, have the phone vibrate, or both.
But when it comes to filtering spam, you probably only want to be notified when an incoming email message is safe and is not a piece of filtered spam.
For older BlackBerry devices with RIM operating system 4 or 5, this is automatically managed for you, so you're all set.
On newer devices running RIM OS 6, the device manages its profiles a bit differently. For these devices, Antair Spam Filter provides its own notification facilities.
For devices running RIM OS 6, in order to receive notifications when a safe email arrives, and suppress notifications when a spam message arrives and is filtered, follow these steps:
Since Antair Spam Filter will manage notifications of arriving email, the default notifications should be disabled. To start, open the profile management system by clicking on the volume/profile icon.
Choose Change Sounds and Alerts.
Choose Profile Management.
Select the profile you want to manage.
Under Messages - Notifiers, select Email.
Turn off the sound notification by changing the volume to Silent. Also, turn off the vibration and LED notifications.
Under Other Applications - Notifiers, select Antair Spam Filter.
Choose the sound, LED, and vibration notifications that you would like to receive when a safe, non-spam message arrives into your inbox. Then, save this profile, and exit the profile management application.
Start Antair Spam Filter, open the Settings screen, and check the box labeled Notify on new non-spam message.
That's all. Now, when a safe, non-spam message arrives to your inbox, Antair Spam Filter will notify you using the notification settings you set up earlier. And when a spam message arrives and is filtered, you will not be bothered with any notification; the spam message will be silently placed into the Antair Spam Filter Spam Box.
Voicemail Attachments
Some corporate voicemail systems allow you to receive voicemail messages as email messages with the voicemail attached as a sound file. Using the Settings screen in Antair Spam Filter, you can specify that you want such messages to always be safe. This way, when you receive a voicemail attachment, the message will not be analyzed or filtered by Antair Spam Filter.
Backup & Restore
Antair Spam Filter data can be backed up to and restored from an SD card. You will find the backup and restore controls in the Antair Spam Filter Settings screen.
Product Support
If you have a question about Antair Spam Filter, you can reach us at www.antair.com/support/.