Anti-Spam Info

The purpose of this site is to provide information on setup and configuration of your anti-spam filter. The tabs below will walk you through the setup process, how to use the filter interface, and how to install and use the Outlook plugin. The tabs are provided in recommended order to follow Spam Quarantine Setup –> Using the Spam Quarantine –> The Report –> Installing the Outlook Plugin –> Using the Outlook Plugin

For existing iValley customers who have been using our previous spam filter from EveryCloud, additional instruction is provided to remove the EveryCloud plugin from Outlook, if you have it installed. If the plugin is not installed, or you are a new customer, disregard the EveryCloud removal tab.

Initial spam quarantine setup

The spam quarantine is where all incoming spam email captured and held for 30 days, after which it will be permanently removed from the quarantine.

The first thing to do is setup your login and password for the anti-spam quarantine.

To do this follow this link: https://antispam.ivalleytech.com/forgotpasswd.php

Enter your email address and hit send. A new password will be emailed to you.

After receiving your new password, login to https://antispam.ivalleytech.com using your email address and the password provided.

Settings

Settings is where you can change your password and setup your two-factor authentication.

Changing your password

To change your password, just enter your current quarantine password, and a new password.

The password must be at least 10 characters long and must contain at least 1 number and 1 letter.

NOTE!!! At this time, the Outlook plugin does not support the use of special characters (@#$%^), so if you intend to use the Outlook plugin, make sure your password consists of only alphanumeric characters. It is recommended to use both uppper and lower-case letters. This bug is expected to be fixed in a future release of the Outlook plugin.

Setup 2 Factor Authentication

To configure 2 factor authentication

Download an authenticator app, like Google Authenticator, or Microsoft Authenticator, on your mobile device.
Once installed, open the app and select the option to scan a QR code and scan the QR code shown in the Two-Factor Authentication area.
Your app will then provide you with a code to enter in the box under your user name. Enter the code and hit the Register button.
The screen will then change to show 2FA is now enabled. It will also list 10 recovery codes you can use if you ever lose your mobile device. Each code can only be used 1 time. Feel free to print those and keep them safe. Of course, if you ever lose those codes and your mobile device is gone, just give us a call and we can reset your 2FA settings for you.

After 2FA is enabled, the next time you login, you will see the following screen after entering your username and password:

Open your authenticator app and enter the code provided.

If you need to disable 2FA (changing phones or want to change authenticator apps), just login and click the Disable button in the 2FA section.

For security, especially if you are using the Outlook plugin, it is highly recommended to enable 2FA.

The spam quarantine holds all email that has been classified as spam for 30 days, after which it is permanently deleted.

Most functions within the spam quarantine can be performed from the spam report, with the exception of adding a domain to your Allow or Block list. The report will only allow a single sender to be added to those lists.

The Spam Quarantine

To login to the spam quarantine, go to https://antispam.ivalleytech.com and login with the email address and password for the spam quarantine (See the Spam Quarantine Setup tab above)

From here, you can select one or more emails to release, allow, or block. These 3 functions are the same as on the spam report:

Release: Sends the email to your inbox, but does not make an exception for future email. Use this for email that you normally don’t want in your inbox, but that one email looks interesting.
Allow: Sends the email to your inbox, and adds the sender to your allowed senders list. All future email from that sender will not be blocked by the spam filter, unless it contains a virus or violates content restrictions.
Block: Permanently rejects future email from that sender. Future email from that sender will not be quarantined and will be immediately rejected.

By clicking on any of the columns, you can sort the quarantine by the From address, the Subject, Date, or even spam Score. Clicking the column once sorts Decending (indicated by the arrow to the right of the column) and a second click will sort the column Ascending.

Clicking the Date range allows you to customize the range of reported emails to focus on a shorter period. If you are looking for something that came in 15 days ago, select a custom date range and only select that 1 day the email came in on, instead of trying to look through the entire quarantine.

The Search Filters dropdown provides even more ways to find something in the quarantine. If bob@bobboblaw.com sent you something, but you did not receive it in your inbox, use the search filter and set the sender email address as bob@bobboblaw.com.

Filter Rules

Filter rules consist of User Block List and User Allow list. Each has a section for email addresses and domains.

Blocked email addresses will reject any email sent from those addresses, keeping them from getting to the spam quarantine.

Blocked domains will reject any email coming from any sender of that domain. If you never want to get email from gmail.com, add @gmail.com to the blocked domains list.

Allow lists work the same way. Either allow an individual sender or allow any sender from that domain.

When adding a domain to the allow or block list, the domain is added with the @ symbol first, then the domain name. For instance, if you wanted to allow all email from bobboblaw.com, go to the User Allow List tab and click the Add… button at the bottom of the Allowed Domains. Enter @bobboblaw.com for the sender domain and hit save.

The option to include subdomains is useful for when a company might have multiple sending domains (the part after the @ symbol).

In this case, if the include subdomains was checked, email from bob@bobboblaw.com and bob@attourney.bobboblaw.com would be allowed. Without the include subdomains checked, bob@attourney.bobboblaw.com could be captured by the spam filter.

The include subdomains checkbox is more useful when blocking a domain, since spammers will try to change up their sending address by using subdomains to get their spam through.

The Report

A spam report is sent up to 4 times per day, but only if spam was captured during the time period. This report will only show new spam captured since the last report. More reports can be requested using the link at the bottom of the last spam report, or the Outlook plugin.

Refer to the image at the bottom for each section.

Section A:

User: your email address
Number of items categorized as spam, virus, or violating a content filter
Aliases: (if any) any of your email address aliases

Section B:

Instructions on what each link does:
- Deliver will sent that message to your inbox.
- Allow will send the message to your inbox AND allow any future emails from that sender to come through (unless a virus is found).
- Block will add that sender to your blocklist, which will reject any future email from that user. Be careful with this link! Any email that is rejected will never come in to the quarantine.
A link to our support email is provided if you have any questions.
A link to this web address is provided in case you need to review this page again.
A link to download and install the Outlook plugin is available (See the tabs on installing and using the Outlook plugin above).
A link to login to the spam quarantine. The spam quarantine is the repository where all your spam resides. See the tab on using the spam quarantine above.

Section C:

The list of spam and content filtered messages.
- Date = Date and time the message was received
- From = The name and email address of the sender
- Subject = The subject of the email
- Score = The spam score applied. This score is calculated based on the content of the email, where it originates from, the type of email, if any attachments are included, if any others have marked the sender as a spammer, or as a good sender, and many other categories. The higher the score, the higher the chance this is spam.

Section D:

Links to request a new report:
- All Quarantined items. This will send a new quarantine report, which will include ALL items in the quarantine. This could be quite a large list.
- New items since last report only. This will send a new report ONLY if new items have been captured by the spam filter. If you use the link, a web page will open and display a new report has been sent. If nothing new was captured in the quarantine, you will not receive a report.
- The quarantine only holds captured email for 30 days, then it is permanently removed.

NOTE!!! The links in a quarantine report are only valid for 7 days. If you find something on an old report that you wish to retrieve, and it is less than 30 days old, but older than 7 days, you will need to either request a new report of all quarantined items, or login to your spam quarantine to release/allow the email.

The Outlook Plugin

The plugin is available for Windows systems running Outlook.

To install the plugin, close Outlook, download and run the installer from here: https://stdownload.titanhq.com/stoa/stoa.msi
- If the plugin fails to download, use the secondary download site: http://www.ivalleytech.com/downloads/stoa.msi
Click Next on the welcome screen
Agree to the license and hit Next
Read the release notes and hit Next
Enter the following and hit Next:
1. URL: antispam.ivalleytech.com
2. Port: 443
Accept the default installation folder and hit Next
Confirm the installation, hit Next
Allow the installation to complete and hit Close
Open Outlook. The following popup should appear, enter all information, if it is missing:
1. URL = antispam.ivalleytech.com
2. Port Number = 443
3. Timeout = 10
4. Use HTTPS should be CHECKED
5. Email = your email address
6. Password = your antispam quarantine password
7. Leave Other settings as is
Hit Test. A popup should appear saying successful. If the popup shows an error or nothing happens, verify your settings are as shown above. Also make sure your password does not contain any special characters. The Outlook plugin only accepts upper and lower case and numbers. This bug will be fixed in a future release of the plugin.
If the test is successful, hit OK to close the plugin options.

By default, the plugin is available under the Add-ins tab:

Add-Ins tab

Advanced option – moving the SpamTitan plugin to a different ribbon location:

The Add-ins tab is not a very useful location for the plugin to reside. It makes more sense to have it on your Home tab, where your other mail options are located. To do this:

Right click on any tab and select Customize the Ribbon
On the right side, click the + to expand the Home (Mail) and Add-ins tab contents.
Highlight SpamTitan and either use the up/down arrows at the right or click and drag to move the selection to the desired location.

After hitting OK, the SpamTitan group will appear as either a single dropdown group or show all buttons available in the group.

This will depend on where in the ribbon the plugin group is placed and how much room is available on the ribbon. Unfortunately, as of Outlook 2019, Microsoft has not provided an easy way to resize the groups on a ribbon. Therefore, to allow the SpamTitan group to expand, you could remove groups from the ribbon that you don’t need. For instance, I don’t use the Speech or Add-ins groups under the Home tab, so I will remove those by using the same steps above to customize the ribbon, but instead of moving a group, I will remove the Speech and Add-ins group by selecting them and hitting the Remove button.

Now that the ribbon has enough space to see all the buttons in SpamTitan, here is the final result:

The Outlook plugin allows you to act on email, directly from the Outlook application.

Once installed and configured, the plugin has the following capabilities:

Flag as SPAM – If an email is selected, and the Flag as SPAM is button is pressed, a signal will be sent to the spam filter to consider that email as spam. The filter will investigate the sender address, and the content of the email. After investigation, it will catalog parts of the email to better learn what is classifying the email as spam. This helps the rating system. This does not add the sender to a block list, it just helps with the A.I. learning.
Flag as HAM – HAM is the opposite of SPAM. Use this if you find something in your spam report that should be considered good. After releasing the email, select it and hit this button. This will instruct the spam filter to learn what makes this email good. This will not add the sender to the allowed senders list.
The 2 dropdown options Block List and Allow List allow you to add the sender to, or remove the sender from, your User Block List or User Allow List. You may think the Remove from Block List is pointless, since if they are on the block list, you won’t receive any email from them in order to select it and remove them, right? Well, that is there just in case you make a mistake. Perhaps you accidentally selected an email and then selected Add to Block List, instead of Add to Allow List. In that case, just select the email again and Remove from Block List.
Check Listed – This allows you to check a sender and see if their sending domain or address is on a block or allow list. Perhaps you would like to make sure an email you received from someone always can come through. Select the email and click Check Listed. A window will appear showing if the email address appears, or does not appear in a block or allow list.
Options – Allows you to change the settings for the plugin. If you ever change your quarantine password, you will need to go into the options and set the new password.
Request Quarantine Report – This will request a full quarantine report. The report will include all items currently in the quarantine. Since the quarantine will keep emails for 30 days, this report can be quite long.