TC Features – Spam-Handling Options

Individuals and organizations enjoy a variety of spam filtering options to precisely tailor message automation.

Flag and Deliver

Users who don’t have a serious spam problem may elect to have spam delivered to their inbox with a spam tag in the subject line. This avoids the need to examine the daily spam digest or inspect the quarantine, and enables the recipient to identify a false-positive immediately.

Quarantine

Spam can be delivered to a web-based quarantine folder for periodic inspection by the intended recipient.

Daily Spam Digest

Users may elect to receive a daily summary of new mail diverted to their quarantine folder. The summary includes the sender, subject line, date and time, and contains links to either release a message to one’s inbox, or release the message and add the sender to the allow list so that future mail from the sender will be delivered directly to the recipient’s inbox.

Vaporize

After becoming comfortable with the accuracy of TC's protection, some users elect to vaporize spam rather than quarantining it. Alternatively, one may elect to vaporize only those messages with a score that exceeds a pre-specified threshold while everything else goes into the quarantine. When utilizing Address-on-the-Fly, users may find that specific merchants or websites share their address. When this happens, the user may “lock down” the AOTF, reserving its use for senders at the domain to which it was originally disclosed while vaporizing all other mail arriving on the address, thereby removing it from their quarantine.

Challenge-Response

In order to minimize the risk of false-positives, users may elect to send a challenge to the sender of any incoming message that fails a delivery test (with the exception of the unknown user and virus tests). While spammers generally don’t respond to challenges (creating the presumption that their email can be properly quarantined or vaporized), this precaution gives legitimate senders the opportunity to identify themselves and have their message delivered. The challenge may take two forms: it can give the sender a means of adding themselves to the user’s allow list by clicking on a link, or it can direct them to resend their message to a new Protective Address automatically created for their use. This approach dramatically reduces the amount of “backscatter” because challenges are triggered by a small fraction of the overall volume of incoming email. (While some users love the effectiveness of Challenge-Response, others are concerned about sending challenges to innocent parties whose email addresses have been hijacked by spammers. We see this as a choice for the user to make.)