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EMAIL MANAGEMENT
Block spam in your Domino environment
By Kai Wilzer

Welcome back to the fight against spam. This is the second part of the story. If you need some background about spam, make sure you read the first part of this series at http://www.dominopower.com/issues/issue200305/00001033001.html. This time, we'll focus on fighting back against spam in your Lotus Domino environment.

Requirements
As I mentioned before, Lotus Domino 5 does not natively support Blacklists, while Lotus Domino 6 does. So we assume that (at least) your SMTP Server is Domino 6. Your Notes clients may still be R5 or of course R6. As there is a small chance that an email could be a "false positive" (i.e., marked as spam even though it's a legitimate email), we don't want to reject spam email but receive them and move them into a different folder. Notes R5 or R6 have an easy solution for this, so we don't want to bother our colleagues with writing a LotusScript agent. Instead we will discover what modifications are necessary in the general mail template.

Options for the user
We want to allow every user to decide on his or her own how to process spam email. Three options may be useful: ignore spam flags, move them to a specified folder, or delete them immediately. Additionally it might be convenient to keep a personal Whitelist, so tagged message may be removed from the spam list if the sender is well-known, (e.g., a business partners). The best place to store all this information may be in the mail preferences (Formname "Calendar Profile") because you already have some mail preferences like letterhead stored there, and the user knows where to find it. Of course, all these options are just recommendations which you may modify to your needs.

Modifying mail preferences form
In the Domino Designer, open the form Calendar Profile from your mail template. Next to the Basics, Letterhead, and Signature tabs, add a new tab "Spam" as shown in Figure A.

FIGURE A

A new spam tab has been added. Click picture for a larger image.

Place a short description next to a radio button field called SpamOptionsTX. This item should have three options:

  • Ignore (spam email is delivered to your inbox just like other email);

  • Move to folder (so your inbox is not flooded but you are still able to check the mail for false positives);

  • Delete (which really means Delete, so there is no chance to recover this email with backups).

Use aliases like I, M, and D to be stored.

Add a text field called SpamFolderTX, which is hidden until the user selects Move to Folder.

Now also add another tab called WhiteList. This tab should contain a short description and an editable mutli-value textfield called SpamWhitelistTX, as shown in Figure B.





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