Birdville ISD SPAM Filter – Self management portal The XEAMS SPAM Filter Birdville ISD SPAM Filter – Self management portal

XEAMS : eXtended Email And Messaging Server XEAMS - Introduction Have you ever been waiting on an e-mail but find that you never receive it? If so the XEAMS portal can assist you! Within the XEAMS portal, you can manage your SPAM emails and deliver them to your inbox as needed, without the opening a helpdesk ticket or calling the helpdesk for support. This program is currently being rolled out to select groups. XEAMS : eXtended Email And Messaging Server

XEAMS – Login Screen To access the portal, visit: https://xeams.birdvilleschools.net Login with your district b##### and your district logon password.

XEAMS - Home Screen

XEAMS Home Screen (Informational) Total Good Messages – shows the total processed messages that were already delivered to your inbox. Total Possible SPAM Messages – these are messages the system thinks are SPAM, but it’s not 100% sure. Some possible reasons for this: a new sender or a fairly new sender with no history of good or bad. Total SPAM Messages – These messages are deemed SPAM by the various filters. For the most part, this is trustworthy, but occasionally a legit message may get flagged as SPAM because of sender scores or message content.

XEAMS – Managing Black & Whitelists Manage White/Black List - This button allows you to whitelist (allow all) or blacklist (deny all) any sender email address. If you have e-mail addresses that you never want to be SPAM filtered, add them to the whitelist. If you want to block a sender from ever reaching you, blacklist them. Use caution here as blacklisting or whitelisting the wrong address can have adverse effects. Example: whitelisting *@hotmail.com would be very bad, as any messages good or bad from the Hotmail.com domain will be delivered. On the other hand, blacklisting *@hotmail.com will block all messages from the Hotmail.com domain.

XEAMS – Searching Messages Message Type - This dropdown allows you narrow down search results when looking for a trapped message. The default of ‘all types’ is the recommended setting, but you can specifically search just possible junk or known junk only. Number Of Days To Search For - This field consists of two parts, a number (default 4) and a starting date. The system will allow you to go back (45) days maximum. Searches under 14 days provide the best results. Example: If today was the 15th March 2018 and you wanted to search from March 1st to March 15th, you would set the first number to ‘15’ and the starting date to Mar 01 2018. Search Field - This dropdown allows further narrowing down of search results. The default is ‘Sender Or Recipients E-mail’ and is good for most searches. You can drop this menu down and select ‘Subject Or Body’ to search for keywords in the message subject or body. This is useful if you don’t know the sender address, but know a keyword that should be present in the message.   Search For - Enter an email address here (if Sender Or Recipient’s Email is selected above) or a search term (if subject or body is selected above).

XEAMS – Working With Search Results 1 Working With Results - Once results are shown, you’ll see a numbered list, separated by a green bar. The green bar contains helpful information. You can select the toggle box to mark multiple messages. The subject line and internal serial number of the message (SN) are shown, along with a number value, three dots and a few flags.

XEAMS – Working With Search Results 2 -Infinity Thru 69 = Good 70-94 = Possible Junk 95+ = SPAM The Score - you can hover over this number to view a list of scores. These scores, also known as weights, will let you know why the message was flagged the way it was. Scores have both negative and positive numbers. As the message is processed by the SPAM filtering engines, it passes through multiple filters, each adding or subtracting from the final score. Example: a sender who has never sent before will have a score of zero. Based on the example shown here, 20 points were added because the keyword ‘earn’ was found. 20 points were added because the message body contains some form of unnecessary character encoding (used by spammers to mask certain things). It added 85 points because the reply-to address is different than the actual sender address. We added 30 points because the email contains multiple images, which is common for image-only spam (messages containing mostly images that the filter can’t look for keywords in). We assigned a -73 because the self-learning Bayesian filter feels the message is good. This leaves this particular message with a final score of 82, which falls under the category of ‘possible’ SPAM.

XEAMS – Restoring A Message (Part 1) Restoring A Message From Possible Junk Or Junk Folders - When you find a message that was incorrectly caught by the filter, you will have to release it to get the message back to your inbox. You should use caution when approving items caught, as you can actually release bad emails that can lead to malware infections, ransomware lockdowns and other malicious events. E-mail is a favored way for the bad guys to get the payloads on your computer. You can click the ‘Subject’ Line (in red) to safe preview the message within XEAMS. This is a controlled environment that will allow you to review the message before sending to your inbox. You can click the grey button on the right ‘Show Unsafe Images’ to see any graphics, by default those are replaced in the preview screen with a placeholder. If reviewing ‘Possible Junk’ you will have the ability to whitelist or blacklist the message. Whitelist (the checkmark) | Blacklist (the red flag) .

XEAMS – Restoring A Message (Part 2) If you click the checkmark to whitelist a message, a screen appears to ‘Mark A Quarantined Message Good’. It will default to ‘Whitelist Sender – enabled’, ‘Whitelist Domain – disabled’, ‘Restore Email – enabled’ as shown above. Whitelist Sender (default: enabled) - will add this sender to your whitelist, preventing future blocks from this sender. Whitelist Domain (NOT RECOMMENDED) – will whitelist an entire domain. We don’t recommend using this option unless you get emails from a single domain by multiple senders. You would never choose this option for any commercial e-mail service available to the general public, such as outlook.com, hotmail.com, yahoo.com, aol.com, gmail.com, etc. Restore Email (default: enabled) – will send the message back to your Outlook client, like it was never trapped.

XEAMS – Marking Possible As SPAM Flagging (Training) The Bayesian Filter by ‘Marking A Good Message SPAM’ – Use this option to tell the SPAM filter that a good message received was actually SPAM. Update Bayesian (selected) – this option is recommended if flagging a ‘possible junk’ message as definite junk message. This option notifies the Bayesian filter to scan it, looking for block-able content to add to the overall system Bayesian database. Mark As Bulk Email – select this option if you get messages with similar content, but changed only a little bit to circumvent filtering systems. Example: if you get 7 new messages within a day and they are all very similar, with only certain words changed up, you can select this option to mark as bulk email. This will set a higher priority to the Bayesian filter to prevent future ‘versions’ of this email from making it to you. Note: this process will not remove messages from your Outlook inbox

XEAMS – Daily Summary E-mail By default, you will receive an email once a day (around 4pm CST by default) with a summary of your caught emails in the past 24 hours. This email will give you quick, at a glance viewing of caught messages. You can click the subject line to safe-preview the message within XEAMS. You can also choose to ‘restore’ the message to your inbox directly from this e-mail.  We can change your delivery reports to be earlier if you like, depending on your schedule.