Email Options and Filters

Support: Email: Email Options

This file describes many of your email options. To access any of these options, login to your account via the web interface, click on "Options" at the top of the screen, and click on the option name from the Options menu.

You need to be a bit cautious in enabling and setting these options to insure that one of your filters or rules doesn't undo or conflict with another filter or rule. If you suddenly stop receiving new mail after adjusting your filters, check each filter setting to see if you landed up essentially blocking all email. Cotse.Net's filters are currently applied in this sequence.

Some Related Topics:

• See Email Filters for an overview of email filters based on how restrictive they are.
• See our Email Spam file for tips on using customized and automatically expiring aliases to prevent spam.
• See Email Headers for how to view full email headers.
• See Web Interface Options for how to color code messages in your inbox for easier spotting

Personal Information

Mail Filters

This contains personal information about yourself such as your name, your email address, time zone, etc. From within this option, you can connect to the option to create additional aliases or identities to use for your outgoing mail or usenet posting. Also see our list of available domain names that you can use for your mail, and enable them by clicking on the Domains link in the Options menu when you are logged into your account.

Here you may set up server-side filters on all of your incoming mail. Filter to folders, redirect to other e-mail addresses, or automatically delete (choose /dev/null in folders list to delete). This option is one of your main ways to manage and sort your email.

Whitelist Senders

SpamAssassin Spam Filtering

Whitelisting guarantees that messages coming from specified senders or domains will be delivered, regardless of any other rules for restricting email. If someone is on your sender whitelist, then even if their email contains language you may have banned in another option, their email will be delivered.

Enable or disable SpamAssassin, and set the spam threshold. SpamAssassin will score the incoming email based on its content to determine whether the message is likely to be spam, and if so, it will be delivered to your Spam folder, deleted, or rejected, at your option.

Block Inline HTML

Handle Attachments

Forbid inline HTML code in your email. Any email meant to be displayed as HTML will be delivered to your Trash folder, deleted, or rejected, at your option.

Since a great deal of spam is sent as html, blocking inline html will help reduce your spam. If you have senders whose html mail you want to receive, you can whitelist them so that their email will be delivered while non-trusted sources' html mail will be sent to your Trash folder, deleted, or rejected, at your option.

Forbid emails with certain potentially dangerous attachments (such as files with .exe, .pif, or .scr extensions). You can select which extension types to forbid or add your own to our menu of choices.

If you forbid particular types of attachments, all messages with such attachments will be delivered to your Trash folder, deleted, or rejected, at your option. If you have friends who send you attachments, you can whitelist their addresses to make sure their email gets delivered.

Goldlist Your Email Aliases

DNSBLs

Goldlist certain email aliases of yours. Similar to Goldlist Sender, if you goldlist aliases, then ONLY email to those aliases of yours will pass through this "gateway," after which your other mail filters or rules will be applied.

Messages sent to any other aliases will either be deleted, delivered to your Trash folder, or rejected, at your option.

DNS-based Spam Databases allow you to select from various online blacklists to block mail.

WARNING: These lists could result in the blocking of e-mail you want, if you are not sure what these do, use the Bayesian filters or SpamAssassin as they are better methods of spam filtering.

Bouncelist (Reject List)

Blacklist Senders or Domains

View and edit the addresses currently being bouncelisted. Bouncelisting means that any email coming from the listed addresses and/or domains will be bounced back to the sender.

While this technique was very popular for a while as a spam-fighting tool bouncing mail back could create the impression that the address isn't a working address (so spammers might delete it from their list), it has fallen out of favor because it contributes to overall email problems when mail gets bounced back to innocent senders whose addresses have been forged by spammers or inserted by worms or viruses.

View and edit the addresses currently being blacklisted. Blacklisting means you are forbidding a sender or domain from sending you email, and any attempts will be delivered to your Trash folder, deleted, or rejected, at your option.

Unsafe Image Rules

SpamCop - Spam Reporting

Set up rules about how potentially unsafe images in HTML messages are handled.

Help fight the battle against unsolicited email. SpamCop reads the spam email and determines the correct addresses to send complaints to. Quite fast, really smart, and easy to use. You will need to sign up for a SpamCop reporting account before being able to use this feature.

Bayesian Spam Filtering

Whitelist Destination

Enable or disable Bayesian filtering, set probability thresholds, and select the algorithm to apply. This type of spam filtering can be trained to recognize what you consider to be valid email and what you consider spam, and it will adapt over time to suit your particular needs. Spam can be delivered to your Spam folder, deleted, or rejected, at your option. You have to actually train this filter by clicking on your email and tagging it as "spam" or "not spam" and it may require a few hundred messages to train this filter, but it is very effective, and is even more effective when used in conjunction with something like SpamAssassin or vocabulary banning.

View and edit the destination addresses currently being whitelisted. This form of Whitelisting guarantees that messages sent to specified aliases and addresses, such as custom addresses you use for mailing lists that you subscribe to, will be delivered regardless of any other rules for restricting email.

Subject-Line Password Protection

Kill/Expire Email Aliases

Password protect your incoming email. This means that only those people who put a certain password phrase or string in their Subject line can send email to you. All other email gets delivered to your Trash folder.

NOTE: this is not the same as your login password! For this feature, you could create a password such as "Cotse Rocks!" and give that password to trusted sources. Any incoming email with "Cotse Rocks" in the subject line will be delivered; all other mail will be sent to Trash.

Kill email aliases you no longer use, or that have become spam traps. Any email addressed to aliases listed here will be delivered to your Trash folder, deleted, or rejected, at your option. Also use automatically expiring aliases.

Goldlist Senders or Domains

Domains

View and edit the addresses currently being goldlisted. Goldlisting senders or domains creates a very exclusive email address where only those senders and domains listed in the goldlist can email to you, and all other email is delivered to your Trash folder, deleted, or rejected, at your option.

Select the domain names you want to have available to you for your email address. Besides using your main Cotse domain, you can also select as may of our other domains as you want and receive email addressed there as well.

Banned Vocabulary

Blacklist IP

View and edit the current list of words or phrases which are banned. Banning these words or phrases is an easy way of blocking email from any number of sources about the same type of thing, i.e. adding "ADV'' will block all email that contains "ADV" anywhere in the header or body of the message, while adding "SILD" will block much of the email concerning Sildenafil.

Email containing banned vocabulary will be delivered to your Trash or Spam folder, or deleted, at your option.

Note that if you whitelist a sender or a sender's domain, that will override this filter.

Block class A, B, or C networks or individual IP addresses if they appear in any of the received headers. If you do not understand what this feature is you likely do not need it; Bayesian filtering, SpamAssassin and the banned vocabulary feature are highly effective in stopping spam, this feature is for advanced antispammers who want to target specific companies and services and block all mail from them.

Translation Options

PGP Plugin Options

Pick a language translator for foreign language mail (only applies to mail retrieved in webmail)

The PGP Encryption Plugin will allow you to encrypt, sign, and decrypt messages in accordance with the OpenPGP standard for email security and authentication.

SpellChecker Options

NewMail Options

Here you may set up how your personal dictionary is stored, edit it, or choose which languages should be available to you when spell-checking (applies only to webmail).

This configures settings for playing sounds and/or showing popup windows when new mail arrives.