CC Checkspam

You have seen the convenience of managing your spam quarantine by logging into the Ceryx Customer Center and by browsing your daily quarantine digests, but do you know that there is an even faster and more convenient way of managing false positives for people who are always on the go?

Say hello to CC Checkspam.

Checkspam is a feature of the Ceryx anti-spam solution that allows you to e-mail a command to Ceryx Customer Center to search for quarantined messages and have the messages released and mailed back to you in real-time. This will work from any desktop or handheld e-mail client provided the account you use to e-mail the command is the one registered in the Customer Center.

Suppose for example you are on the road and are waiting for an important e-mail from your vendor, john.doe@vendor.com. You suspect that the message was quarantined but your CC Quarantine Digest is set to be sent at 10 PM everyday and you have to respond to this vendor before 5 PM. It’s already 4:45 PM and you an hour away from your hotel where you can connect to the internet and log in to the Customer Center in order to release the message. All you have is your BlackBerry that is configured with your Ceryx account.

To quickly release the message, compose a new email on your BlackBerry, address it to checkspam@ceryx.com, enter the e-mail address john.doe@vendor.com in the subject line and then send the message. The system receives your message, queries your quarantine for all messages from john.doe@vendor.com and automatically releases all messages found to your inbox.

Checkspam can only search the From field of quarantined messages. It uses the “contains” comparison operator to compare the value in the Subject field of your submission with the From field of quarantined messages. This means the more general the value you submit, the more quarantined e-mail could potentially be released.

In the example given above, you could have put @vendor.com as the subject in your e-mail instead of john.doe@vendor.com and that would release all messages from any of your vendor’s e-mail users.

Because Checkspam uses this implicit wildcard comparison operator, great care should be taken in choosing the subject of your submission. Do not put just an @ sign or a dot as your subject unless you want everything in your quarantine released to your mailbox.

The Ceryx Customer Center, or CC for short, is a web-based application that allows Ceryx E-mail Firewall users to manage their filtering service. With CC, users can write filters to block spam or allow legitimate mail through. CC administrators in addition can create, modify and delete CC accounts as well as view email firewall statistics. For customers who are on the Ceryx Hosted Exchange service, CC version 1.6 is integrated with Exchange to allow administrators to also manage their e-mail service. When an administrator creates a CC 1.6 account, for example, a corresponding Ceryx Exchange account is also created. For more information on what else you can do with CC 1.6, please contact sales@ceryx.com.

Ian