IPFW Home
Training & Documentation

Blocking Spam with the IronPort Spam Quarantine

The IronPort Spam Quarantine is a spam filter available to all IPFW students, staff, and faculty. Messages that IronPort identifies as spam will be “quarantined”--they will be kept out of your inbox, but will still be available to you by logging into the service.

You can also choose to block email from particular email addresses or domains. If you get a spam message from johndoe@spam.com, for example, you can choose to block all incoming messages from that sender. You can also choose to block all messages from spam.com, regardless of who is sending them.

Logging Into the IronPort Spam Quarantine

To access your spam messages, go to https://mailsec.ipfw.edu. Log in using your IPFW network user id and password.

Once you have logged into the service, you will see a list of any messages that have been quarantined. You can read, release, or delete messages from this list.

List of spam messages

Read Messages

To read a message, simply click the subject of the message to display it.

Delete Messages

Messages that have been quarantined can be permanently deleted. Quarantined messages are also deleted automatically after 14 days.

  1. Click the checkbox next to the message that you would like to delete.
  2. From the "Select Action..." drop-down menu, select Delete.
  3. Click the "Submit" button.

Release Messages

If you discover that a message has been quarantined that should not have been, you can move that message to your inbox by releasing it. To release a message:

  1. Click the checkbox next to the message that you would like to release.
  2. From the "Select Action..." drop down menu, select Release.
  3. Click the "Submit" button.

Blocklists and Safelists

You can block email from a particular email address, or all addresses from a particular domain, by adding that address or domain to your Blocklist. Conversely, you can add email addresses and domains to your Safelist to ensure that no messages from that address or domain are flagged as spam and quarantined.

To add an email address or domain to your Blocklist:

  1. Select "Options" from the upper right corner.
  2. From the list that appears, select "Blocklist".
  3. Enter the email address or domain that you would like to block in the available text field and click "Add to List".
    1. If you want to block an email address, type the address in the form "user@domain.com".
    2. If you want to block an entire domain, for example all emails from Yahoo.com, type the domain name in the form "domain.com". Note that this will prevent you from receiving message from anyone sending email from this domain.
  4. To remove an email address or domain from your Blocklist, click the Delete icon next to the item.

To add an email address or domain to your Safelist:

  1. Select "Options" from the upper right corner.
  2. From the list that appears, select "Safelist".
  3. Enter the email address or domain that you would like to allow in the available text field and click "Add to List".
    1. If you want to allow an email address, type the address in the format "user@domain.com".
    2. If you want to allow an entire domain, type the domain name in the format "domain.com".
  4. To remove an email address or domain from your Safelist, click the Delete icon next to the item.