Email Administrator's Guide

This document provides Email Administrators with an overview of how Death2Spam works, and ways to configure your domain's email delivery settings for optimal results. It should be used as a reference during new customer registrations, for help with the configuration of Death2Spam, and as a resource for trouble-shooting and general system administration. Topics included are:

• Overview of the Death2Spam SMTP Sentinel interceptor architecture;
• Guide to completing the Death2Spam configuration wizard;
• Installation and SMTP configuration check-list;
• Reference guide on tools available to domain administrators;
• FAQ for common problems encountered when configuring the Death2Spam service.

How Death2Spam Works

Death2Spam is anti-spam filtering software deployed as a managed (hosted) service, outside of your organization's internal network. It is designed to rapidly filter the incoming email traffic for your entire domain.

To use Death2Spam's interception service, your domain's email traffic will be directed to a Death2Spam server for filtering. Once an email has been received by Death2Spam, it is classified, and any spam and malware is quarantined. Legitimate (good) email is then relayed on to your mail server.

How email gets to your domain:

The following diagram shows how email messages currently flow into your domain's mail server. First, a Mail Exchanger (MX) lookup query is performed by the sender, against a Domain Name Server (DNS). The MX information tells the message's sender which IP (Internet Protocol) address is your domain's mail host.

After the email has been sent to your host server using Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), it's then available for retrieval via POP3, IMAP or MAPI (various electronic mail download protocols). Users poll the mail server, and download new messages to their desktop email program.

How D2S captures junk mail and malware:

The D2S Configuration Wizard configures a Death2Spam server so that it's able to relay legitimate email messages to your domain, after scanning for viruses and spam. The following diagram shows how D2S is transparently inserted into the SMTP chain, capturing the junk messages, then forwarding the good ones on to your domain's mail server.

Instead of a "one size fits all" solution, your email users are able to teach the D2S message classifier about their individual preferences, via a simple and intuitive web interface. Well-trained accounts typically obtain better than 99.5% spam-filtration accuracy, with less than 0.05% false positives (legitimate email mis-classified as spam).