SpamTitan Product Feature Tips – Enable Penpals, Outbound Filtering, SpamAssassin

Enabling Penpals

The Penpals functionality in SpamTitan is a way of categorising email senders as know correspondents and most likely to be sending clean email. In short it means if the sender  sends you an mail, and I reply to your email, it’s likely that the reply will be a clean email. When this happens SpamTitan  adds a minus score. The longer the time between the original email being received and the reply, the smaller the score we subtract.
SpamTitan uses an internal algorithm to determine the exponential decay. With a penpal bonus score of 3, if the age of a reply is 1 week, then the bonus score would be ~1.5. If the reply came in after 2 weeks, then the bonus score would be ~0.75
In order to enable PenPals on your SpamTitan installation You MUST be using SpamTitan for both outbound and inbound email in order for Penpals to work.

VMware – To convert from ESX to ESX 3.5

You can’t import the a VMware Server SpamTitan into an ESX or ESXi system.
You can use the VMware Converter or the ESXi ovf converter tool on the SpamTitan ESX download.
It is then possible to take a back up of the VMware Server SpamTitan settings and import them on ESX or ESXi . Before you take the backup ensure that HTTP is enabled for your web browser and any of your SSL certs have been deleted and HTTPS is set to use the self signing cert. You will then need to reload your SSL certs after you import the backup.
Please ensure that the system you take a backup from and import to are running the same versions.
Also if you are upgrading from V4 to V5 and using Vmware Server 1, then you need to install the V5 ISO as the V5 Vmware Image for Vmware server  that we offer as a download is not compatible with the V5 hardware version.

Setting up Outbound filtering

SpamTitan supports both Inbound and Outbound Filtering on the one system.
In order to enable your server to use SpamTitan to send filtered outgoing mail, you need to add its IP address to Trusted Networks via the System Setup->Mail Relay page.
Set the Oubound Policy as you wish but don’t enable Email Reports. Your Exchange Server will need to have its setting for Outbound email set to point to SpamTitan.

SpamAssassin

With the new SpamAssassin available in the next release it is advisable that customers check and populate their internal network section on anti spam engine -> settings -> internal networks. Internal networks would be any system on a customers network that email passes through.
For further information on any of the above subjects please contact spamtitan@titanhq.com