OpenAccess MailGuard

The MailGuard Spam Filtering System

Go here to login to the MailGuard spam filtering system.

Remember, your login for MailGuard is username@domain.com, like username@nas.com or username@openaccess.org.

OpenAccess customers have been using MailGuard for a few years now and we have had an excellent experience with it. Once MailGuard is properly trained it is very good at making sure you get the mail you want and do not get the mail you do not want.. Unfortunately, only you know the kinds of e-mail you do and do not want. MailGuard makes a basic guess depending on whether you choose 'off', 'low', 'medium' or 'high' sensitivity settings, but after that it needs you to tell it which e-mails are spam and which are not, especially when you first begin using it.

MailGuard stores both your good and bad e-mails for you to review and teach it your preferences, which means that if there is an e-mail that was wrongly tagged, you can quickly login, mark it is 'good' and it will be in your inbox a couple minutes later.

The whitelist features makes it great for mailing lists you may be subscribed to. In particular, many mailing lists because of the nature of what they are and how they are delivered, frequently get mis-tagged as spam. Just recover those from your MailGuard spam box and make sure they are white listed and you will always get them again, all the time.

As MailGuard is new for NAS.COM customers, we will be informally tracking the most common questions and answers about how the system works and how to use it and finally get our website here updated with that information.

MailGuard Frequently Asked Questions

MailGuard looks complicated, what should I do when I login?
A. Well, the first thing to do, right on the first page, is set your general preferences - the lower left of the page after you login. To start out with, we suggest you pick 'medium'. Once you do that, then check on your 'Cache Contents' (on the lower right) and look through the Report/Confirm and Report/Rescue area. Of particular interest is Rescuing e-mail. This is e-mail you want that was mis-tagged as spam! If there is just too much to do, you can always just do 'delete' at the bottom of the first page, which just scrubs everything out without rescuing or reporting anything. However, as usual in life, the easy way out is not best. By spending the time to go through and mark the e-mails you have received as either legitimate or spam, you will help not just yourself but everybody else on the Internet. Short term pain, long term gain!

How long does MailGuard keep my e-mail caches?
A. Mailguard keeps e-mail on the system for 15 days. Please keep in mind that we are not providing the e-mail storage on MailGuard as a bonafide e-mail service, only as an anti-spam service. In the past, we have had people who were unaware of webmail and actually just used MailGuard to read all their e-mail and were upset when stuff older than 15 days was gone!

I keep getting e-mail with the subject '* Possible SPAM *'
A. This is a modification that OpenAccess has made to MailGuard in response to customers requests over the years. Basically, when MailGuard finds something that is looking kind of like spam, but isn't really sure, it tags it and forwards it on to you.? It seems (at least from customers telling us!) that in those marginal cases, folks would like to get that e-mail rather than not. If you want to go 'full MailGuard', then you can do so by going to 'settings', clicking on your e-mail address, and then making the 'consider mail spam' and 'quarantine spam' exactly the same number.? We recommend using the lower of the two values.

What does 'delete all items' do
A. This is the easy way to handle your spam if you are not worried about losing legitimate email. It erases everything from MailGuard without rescuing any legitimate e-mail or reporting anything. It can be quite useful if you are on vacation and come back and login and find 100s of e-mails on there and just don't have the time or need to go through them all. As always, if you can spare a few minutes, we highly recommend that you at least skim through your e-mail and tag what you can for rescue or marked as definite spam.

What does MailGuard 'report' and who does it report to?
A. MailGuard does not report your actual e-mails, rather it creates a digital finger print of your e-mail and forwards that out. The places that MailGuard reports to are primarly located in Europe although quite a few Universities and well funded open source projects in the U.S. also operate as report consolidators. In essence, the reporting system takes a synopsis of the features of your e-mail that make it look spammy, certain words in sequence, sender addresses (which is why mailing lists often get marked as spam) and other items. The most complex aspect of spam right now is image based spams, as they are now (as of 4/16/07) sending those images from 10s of thousands of hijacked computers, each of which crafts the image in a slightly different way. From a techncal perspective, this is actually an interesting aspect of spam since if this problem can be solved it will provide a great but simplified implementation how to do vision with computers, one of the hardest problems in computer science.