There are two parts to using Maia Mailguard to defend your inbox. You can click on the links below to take you to instructions for each:
1.
Login the first time.
a. Navigate to http://mailfilter.gwd50.org in your web browser.
b. Enter your email address and email password and click the “login” button as shown in the example below.
- Tell
Maia about your “other” email addresses (the ones that end in
@gwd50.k12.sc.us and @mail.gwd50.k12.sc.us)
- Click on the “gear” symbol to go to the settings
for your account.
- For now, we are only interested in the top part of this screen where you can add new email addresses. Type in your “other” email address and your email password and click “Add E-Mail Address” to add it.
- Do the same for both your @gwd50.k12.sc.us and @mail.gwd50.k12.sc.us address. When you are done, your screen should look similar to the image shown below.
3.
Set your spam filtering level
a. Click the “home” icon on the Maia toolbar to return to the home screen.
- Scroll down until you see the “Current Protection Level Box”
- Choose your protection level and click the “Change Level” button. It is suggested that you choose “High” and only back off of it if you have a problem with too many of your “good” messages being caught by the filter. Remember, you can always rescue any messages that get caught, so you will not miss any messages.
- Set up your quarantine digest
emails.
This requires a bit of explanation. Maia holds copies of messages that it scores as both spam and non-spam in order for you to: 1.) rescue any that were incorrectly marked as spam and 2.) for you to confirm both good and bad messages to help train the filter. In order to remind you to do this training, it will send you an email showing all of your held messages. We need to tell Maia to do this AND how often it should send the reminder message.
- Click on the “gear” icon to return to the settings screen.
- Scroll down so that you can see “Miscellaneous Settings”
- Click on the radio button to enable the quarantine reminder email.
- Fill in the box labeled “Email Digest Interval” with the number of minutes Maia should wsit before sending you another reminder. You might want to start with every 4 hours (240 minutes) and see if that is too often or too seldom for you. Some possible values are shown below
Once a day = 1440
Twice a day = 720
Every 6 hours = 360
Every 4 hours = 240
Every 2 hours = 120
That’s it! Maia Mailguard is configured and ready to start helping you. We suggest you let it run for a while (maybe a day or two) so that it can collect some mail, then go through the regular operation instructions.
Your regular interaction with Maia Mailguard and your personal mail quarantine is very simple and consists of several basic tasks:
- Confirming spam – This is how you tell Maia “good job” when it marks a spam message as actually being spam. Maia is, in some ways, like a child and needs to be trained to know good from bad.
- Confirming good messages – Much like with a child, you also need to tell Maia that it has done a good job in identifying good messages. Otherwise, it never “learns” what kinds of messages are good, and eventually will “learn” that almost all messages are bad.
- Telling Maia it made a mistake – This is to let Maia know that it marked a good message as bad or vice versa. Keeping with the “Maia as a child” analogy, you are essentially “scolding” Maia to not make that mistake again.
- Deleting messages – Sometimes you just do not have time to tell Maia “good” or “bad” for all of your messages. When that happens, you should just delete all of the messages in the list so that your account in Maia is cleaned out. It is ok to do this once in a while, but remember, it is the training that makes Maia adapt to your email habits and be able to catch new types of spam that you might start receiving. So try to train Maia whenever you get a chance.
All of these tasks can be handled from the web interface, which you will see first. Then, you will see examples of the “Quarantine Digest” emails that Maia will send you and how you can use them to interact with your Maia quarantine.
Working with your Non-Spam items
When you log into Maia, you’ll see the home page which will include an area called “Cache Contents” as shown below. One section of this, labeled in the picture is your non-spam items.
If you click on the envelope, you’ll be taken to a list of the items that Maia determined were not spam. These are the messages that will have been passed through Maia and into your GroupWise mail. You’ll notice that there are boxes beside each message for “Spam,” “Non-Spam,” and “Delete.” This is how you indicate to Maia what your judgment of each message is. Notice in the image below that some messages have been marked in each category.
Usually, you can reserve the “delete” option for messages that you think are borderline spam…you may not really like them, but you do not want Maia to learn them as especially good or bad. Once you have marked messages, you can click on “Confirm Status of these items” and they will be removed from your quarantined items and passed off to Maia’s training routine.
If there is a message that you are unsure about just by looking at the subject, you can click on the subject and view the entire message as shown below. This view gives you some information about how your message was scored and lets you see the contents of the message. You also have a number of options for dealing with the message, including “Reporting as Spam,” “Confirm this Non-spam,” “Delete this Item,” “View Raw,” or “(Re)Deliver this mail.” Most of these are self explanatory. The ones worth mentioning are “View Raw” and “Redeliver.”
“View Raw” lets you look at the raw text of the email message. This probably is not very useful in most cases, but sometimes Maia does not do a good job of showing you what a message looks like. “View Raw” can help you in those situations.
“Redeliver” tells Maia to send this message back through to GroupWise. This option is not too useful when working with non-spam mail, since it will have been already delivered. It is, however useful, when you are working with Spam that might have been mislabeled.
*One important thing to note about viewing individual mails is that sometimes Maia cannot figure out how to show you the message at all. This happens sometimes with “fancy” emails that contain backgrounds, pictures, etc. If you click on a message and get a blank screen, that just means that Maia cannot display the message. In those situations, you’ll have to click “back” in your browser and make a decision about that message from the main Non-Spam Screen.
Working with your Spam items
Working with Spam messages is almost identical to working with Non-Spam messages. Again, you start at the home screen with your Cache Contents. This time, however, you are going to use the “Report/Rescue” function on the spam section.
The view for spam messages looks almost exactly like the non-spam ones, and operates exactly the same way. You can mark each message and then comfirm all just like you did with non-spam, or you can look at individual messages.
When you mark a message as non-spam, Maia will send it for delivery to your GroupWise mailbox and submit it to training as non-spam.
That’s all there is to the basic operation of Maia Mailguard. There are, of course, more options that you can set in Maia including custom white and black lists as well as tweaking your own personal spam score threshold. Once you are very comfortable with Maia and how it operates, you may want to investigate those. For now, let’s look at the quarantine messages that Maia will send to you…
Quarantine Notification
Maia will send you periodic notifications about the messages in your quarantine, both good and bad. This is to remind you to train Maia and to make sure you know about the messages that have been blocked. The great thing about these messages is that you can manage your quarantine directly from the links contained in the message. Take a look at the image and the explanation of each of the available links.
Log in – Takes you directly to your Maia welcome page
Release – Allows a spam message to be delivered to your mailbox and sends it for training as non-spam
Subject – Takes you directly to this message in Maia
Whitelist – Marks this sender as “always good” which will bypass Maia spam filtering on him or her forever (or until you change your whitelist settings)
Report – Tells Maia that this non-spam message is actually spam and sends it for training.
Confirm all Remaining Items – This tells Maia that for every message that you have not yet confirmed, Maia was correct in marking them spam or non-spam.
Notice there is no way to delete all messages from the digest. You must either mark them all off OR login to Maia if you want to delete any.