|
OasisOnline Spam Server FAQ
Last updated:
10/29/2007
Q: What is the “Barracuda SPAM
Firewall?”
A: The Barracuda is a new server, recently
acquired and setup to work at Oasisonline for the purpose of increasing
our level of resolution to fight SPAM (unwanted, unsolicited
emails). This unit screens all incoming email destined to our
customers’ email inboxes, and checks it for viruses, worms, and SPAM
oriented email before it even gets to your inbox.
The Barracuda inserts itself, as an email
monitoring system, between the Internet and the mail server
containing your email box. In this way, it is able to screen out
SPAM related email and dispose of it without bothering the email
server. Since the barracuda unit is a highly specialized and
dedicated equipment solely designed for this purpose, it is an
extremely efficient machine that is helping organizations of all
sorts to eliminate a high percentage of spam related email.
The Barracuda unit is not, therefore, where your
email box resides, it is just a temporary place where the end user
can easily monitor email traffic passing through, attempting to be
delivered to his/her email box.
Q: I have received a “Summary” of quarantine
and blocked emails from the barracuda.oasisonline.com, but when I try to
log in, it tells me wrong password. I am entering my regular email
password, am I missing something?
A: There is no synchronization occurring
between your regular email (i.e. mailto:username@oasisonline.com)
account, and its password to the barracuda unit. The unit will
create this “summary” of quarantined emails and send it to your
attention to your regular email box. It has a link for you to log
into the unit and verify each email you received as to decide if,
indeed it is ok to be blocked, allow it to enter your email inbox,
or even put in on your white list. However, this is a temporary link
with a temporary password, which you do not need to even try to
remember, but it will expire after 24 hours. This does not mean you
will not be able to enter again into the unit, but you need to reset
the password that has expired. To do this, follow the link provided
to you on your email, and when you get to the Barracuda page stating
“Error: Session Expired”, enter your full email address in
the “Username” field, and click on the button below reading
“Create New Password”. This will instruct the barracuda
server to email you a new password just to enter to the unit and
check the list of blocked/quarantined emails. Important:
This will not change your regular email password; you do not have to
do any changes to your email settings.
_____________________________________________________
After you click on the “Create New
Password”, and you receive a new email on your inbox, which
looks like the following example:
-----------------------
Welcome to the
Barracuda Spam Firewall. This message contains the information
you will need to access your Spam Quarantine and
Preferences.
Your account has
been set to the following username and password:
Username: yourusername@oasisonline.com
Password: yourusernameXxx
You may login
using the following URL: http://barracuda.oasisonline.com:8000/cgi-bin/index.cgi?user=username@succeed.net&password=d0347c782570c2344399222e&et=9899483616
Please be sure to
change your password.
----------------------
NOTE: mailto:username@oasisonline.com
will be different for each user. It will be your own username.
At this point, you can either return to the main
login page of the barracuda at http://barracuda.oasisonline.com:8000/cgi-bin/index.cgi?user=username@oasisonline.com&password=d0347c782570c2344399222e&et=9899483616,
enter your full email address and the password provided in the
“Password” field, as indicated above
OR
Simply click on the URL link provided to you,
which already contains your username and temporary password assigned
to your account on the barracuda server. You will then automatically
enter your personal settings.
Q: Will I have to keep resetting this
temporary password every time I need to log into the unit? It can be
quite annoying.
A: No, absolutely no, you do not have to do it
every time. For security reasons, the temporary password emailed to
you is meant to be, precisely, temporary. Once you log into the
unit, you will find at the top menu the option “Preferences”,
if you click on that tag, there will be another button, underneath
the main menu, reading “Security”. Click on that one, and in
this area, you can enter the old password, which was emailed to you
in by the unit, and a new password. By design, the temporarily
created password is long and it contains upper case and lower case
letters and numbers. We strongly encourage you to choose a password
which follows the same policy, that is, use upper and lower case
letters and numbers and at least eight (8) characters in length.
This is done with the purpose of preventing hackers (and other
unwelcome guests) to guess your password.
Tip: Setting your password the same as
your email account makes this easy to remember and use.
Tip: If your username password is short
and easy to guess, it makes it easy to guess for an intruder, thus,
be careful selecting the length of your password. You can
incorporate numbers resembling or instead of some letter like number
"3" for "e", zero (0) instead of an "O", 1 instead of an "i", 7
instead of a "T", and symbols like @, #, !, within. (i.e. Security
--> S3cur1ty!). More information about strong password choosing
can be found at the following link Creating
Strong Passwords.
Once you have saved your password, you can return
to the Barracuda server URL, and simply enter your email address and
your password to login.
Q: I am not sure to fully understand the
Quarantine Inbox menu. What do the links mean, etc?
A: The Quarantine Inbox screen is meant to
provide you with a user-friendly interface to the barracuda server,
which has put “on-hold” or blocked several emails, which are most
likely SPAM. This box, which is not your email box, can be seen as a
“temporary detention center”. It is a place the barracuda unit
utilizes to detain certain “suspicious” email, and provide you, the
end user, with the last word as to deliver it one time only
occurrence, white list it, or delete it.
The screen looks like the following:
There are two tags in the upper part. "Quarantine
Inbox" and "Preferences". Use the Quarantine Inbox to review email
in “detention”.
At this point, you can either select individual
emails using the check boxes located to the left of each email, and
then proceed to click on one of the buttons above indicating
“Deliver”, “Whitelist” or “Delete” in order to perform that action
to the group of emails you have check marked, or you can
individually click on the links on the right side, below the
"Actions" column, reading "Deliver", "Whitelist", and "Delete".
Deliver will release the selected email(s)
from quarantine and allow the email to be delivered to your inbox
immediately.
Whitelist will add the senders email
address to a list of emails from people you would like to be
delivered regardless of content. Thus, any email on your whitelist
will be delivered to your email box, no questions asked. You
may view what addresses are in your whitelist and add / delete this
list by going to the "Preferences" tab and selecting
"Whitelist".
Delete will permanently delete the
selected email(s) and report this email, as SPAM, to aid in the
Barracuda system learning what suspicious emails are truly spam.
Q: What are the different menus, inside the
"Preferences" tab, used for?
A: The Barracuda unit is a very versatile server,
and it allows the each end user to configure some of the settings in
a per-user basis. This is done because people tend to have different
preferences as to what kind of email they wish or not to receive,
and while there is a global setting for some pure, beyond doubt,
obvious SPAM, there are other types of emails, which may or may not
be considered SPAM depending who do you ask. The Barracuda designers
understood this, and provided the end user with a degree of control
over his/her own emails. This is where the Preferences tab comes
handy.
It has the following options, which can be
selected by clicking on them:
Quarantine Enable/Disable:
Spam
Filter Enable / Disable:
Whitelist /
Blacklist:
Quarantine
Notification:
Security:
 |