Spam Blocking-Cache Spam Black Lists

Introduction

This howto describes black listing for the AntiSpam Spam Blocker. The AntiSpam Spam Filter also uses black listing of a different type.

Caching means you maintain temporary local copies of black listed sites. This keeps your email server from having to contact the black list sites over the Internet. But also means the black lists could be out of date, since a site you have cached may no longer be black listed, for example. The black list organizations recommend against caching, but it is useful for slow and dialup connections.

You can manually enter IPs to the black list. The cache has a timeout option for automatically deleting IPs from the black list.

Requirements

Black List caching requires you to know:

• how long you want to keep cached IP addresses.
• how many addresses you want to cache.

The defaults of 15 minutes for the timeout and 50 addresses are pretty good.

How To

To enable black list caching:

1. Use the Spam blocker command from the Security menu. This displays the Spam Blocker dialog.
2. Select the Spam Blocker Caching tab.
3. Enable the Automatically cache Spam Blocker results check box.
4. Manually enter an IP Address in the IP Address text box.
5. Enter the Default time to live (minutes) for the cached IPs.
6. Enable the Automatically cached entries use default time to live also check box if you want to use a timeout for IPs collected from the black list sites.
7. Use the Add command button to add the IP to the Current cached entries.
   (You can delete an IP by selecting it and using the Remove command button.)
   (You can remove all IPs from the cache by using the Clear command button.
8. Use the OK command button to exit from the Spam Blocker.

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