DandyNet offers a Virus and Spam filtering service which will keep a great deal of unwanted mail from ever reaching your Inbox. Each time a message is sent to your address, the filters will first scan it and then, if it passes the criteria and is determined to probably not be spam or other objectionable material, it will be passed on to your account on our mail server, where it will wait for you until you check your e-mail. If the filters determine that it is probably spam, it will stay quarantined in your personal Message Center for 14 days or until you deliver or delete it manually. You may use your Message Center to adjust your filter settings to make them more aggressive (let less messages through) or more lenient (let more through), or to turn the filters off entirely. You may also specify e-mail addresses or entire domains to either let through all the time or never let through. Your filters are totally customizable to your personal preferences.
How do I access my message center?
You can go to the Message Center at http://login.postini.com/ and use your e-mail address as a Login Address and the password that was sent to you in a previous message. A link to the Message Center is also listed as "Spam & Virus Filters" on the main http://www.dandy.net/ page under the heading "Special Features". Once logged into the Message Center, you can view all the messages that the filters have caught for your account. If the filter caught any messages that you actually wanted to receive, you may pass them on to your inbox and set the filters to allow messages from that sender to reach you. You may also use the Message Center to customize the filters to be as strong (letting less messages reach you) or as weak (letting more through) as you like.
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I forgot my message center password, what should I do?
You can easily regain access to your Message Center by resetting the password. To reset your Message Center password, just go to the Message Center login page and try to log in with what you think the password might be. An error page will appear, with a link on it for "Forgot Your Password?" Click on that link and a new temporary password will be sent to you by e-mail. You may then access your Message Center and change the password. Please keep in mind that passwords are case sensitive, meaning that "Password" is different from "PASSWORD", which is different from "PaSsWoRd", which is different from "Passwords". The Message Center is independent from your actual e-mail account, so changing the password for one will not affect the other.
If you receive your new temporary password and still cannot login, please call us at 800-636-1188, Option 2. We are available Mon - Sat, 9:00 am to 10:00 pm and will be happy to help you.
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What is the "Blocked Senders List"?
You may use the filters to block junk e-mail from reaching your Inbox without adding each individual sender to the Blocked List. In fact, as contrary as it sounds, blocking individual senders of spam is usually a useless proposition anyway, as the spammers change their "From" address so frequently, and since the "From" Address is nearly always forged.
If you want to receive as few spam messages as possible, we recommend setting all of your filters to the highest (most aggressive) setting. These filters catch messages based on content, not necessarily From Address. They grab phrases like "Accept Credit Card Payments Online!" and other common advertising taglines and formats. The messages that the filters catch will stay in your Message Center (and out of your inbox!) for up to 14 days before being automatically deleted. You can log into your message center as often or as infrequently as you like just to make sure that no valid non-spam messages were inadvertently quarantined. The junk that accumulates in your Message Center can be ignored, deleted all at once with "Remove All Messages", or individually deleted as you see fit.
If you do need to use your Blocked Senders list for specific messages that aren't just generic spam that the filters will catch anyway (such as for mailing lists that you can't seem to get unsubscribed from), you may be able to consolidate your Blocked Senders List by blocking entire domains instead of individual addresses. For example, if you have the following senders blocked:
Online-12843-mailing-list@lists.spammersdomain.ru
Online-X8483-mailing-list@lists.spammersdomain.ru
Online-Fos5464-mailing-list@lists.spammersdomain.ru
Online-568433-mailing-list@lists.spammersdomain.ru
Online-5484269-mailing-list@lists.spammersdomain.ru
Online-afujwe998-mailing-list@lists.spammersdomain.ru
Online-admin-mailing-list@lists.spammersdomain.ru
You may want to block simply lists.spammersdomain.ru, which will take one slot on the Blocked List and eliminate many more than one address. Be careful when blocking an entire domain, though, since if you block something large and common like yahoo.com, you may inadvertently miss legitimate mail.
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What does "Aggressive" mean in the mail filters?
"Aggressive" is a setting for your filters that tells them how carefully and thoroughly you want the filters to check your messages before passing them on to your inbox. The more aggressive you make the filters (the higher the setting you give them), the less likely you are to receive spam. However, setting the filters very high also increases the possibility that the filters will catch mail that isn't actually advertisements, so if you set your filters very high, you may want to check your Message Center often to make sure they are only catching junk and not your real mail.
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What I hit "Deliver" in the message center, the message does not show up in my Inbox.
Please make sure that you have placed a check mark in the box beside the message that you want to deliver before clicking the "Deliver" Button.
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Why am i receiving fewer messages per day than before?
The missing messages are pieces of spam from Dictionary attacks that are being blocked at the "door" to Dandy's network. In a dictionary attack, the spammers target a domain such as Dandy.net for a variety of reasons, among them being size of the domain and presence or absence of any type of filtering service. They then use an automated program to make up a list of virtually all possible user IDs on that domain. First Initial, Last name combinations like "kjones" or "jsmith" and First Name, Last Initial combinations such as "jamesd", "robr" are unfortunately all too common and easily generated by these programs. The spammer then sends their message out to all of these generated addresses, usually from a faked "From" address so that he is not caught and does not have to deal with the undeliverable return messages from any generated addresses that do not actually exist on the domain. Mail from these attacks is blocked before it could even hit the Quarantined section, so the physical number of junk e-mails received by our members has been reduced as well as the number of junk e-mail messages that actually reach the Inbox.
If you think you may be missing legitimate e-mail or mail from mailing lists you normally want to receive, you can go to your Message Center and either opt to specifically allow a given sender's address or entire domain so that messages from that origin are never checked by the filters, or you can turn the filters off all together (temporarily or permanently) and monitor the numbers of messages you then receive. The filters are fully customizable to your needs and preferences.
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How do I move an address from the "Blocked Senders List" to the "Approved Senders List"?
Through your Message Center at http://login.postini.com/ , you can manage your own quarantined e-mail and filter settings, including which senders are blocked and which are allowed. To transfer an address from your blocked list to you allowed list, simply log into your Message Center and click on "Junk E-mail Settings". Scroll down about 1/3 of the way and you will see boxes for both "Blocked Senders" and "Approved Senders". Locate the address you want to remove in the "Blocked Senders" list and highlight it. Then click the "Delete From List" button. To add it to the approved list, type the address into the box under the heading "Approved Senders" and click the "Save To List" button.
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Can Dandy release my Quarantined Mail to me?
You may release your own mail from within your Message Center . To Deliver your messages, just place a check mark in the box by those you wish to deliver, and click the "Deliver" button. You may also add those senders to your "Approved Senders" list so that messages from these senders will not be flagged in the future.
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Why is some junk mail still getting through?
Because it is impossible to set up one set of standard filtering criteria that will suit the needs and preferences of thousands of individual users, every user has a Message Center that allows them to customize their own filters as they see fit. Through your Message Center, you can manage your own quarantined e-mail and filter settings, including which senders are blocked and which are allowed. You may use your Message Center to adjust your filter settings to make them more aggressive (let less messages through) or more lenient (let more through), or to turn the filters off entirely.
If you want to receive as little junk mail as possible, we recommend setting all of your filters to the highest (most aggressive) setting. This is done from within the Message Center by clicking on "Junk E-mail Settings" and razing the number rating each category of junk mail is given.
These filters catch messages based on content, not necessarily From Address. They grab phrases like "Accept Credit Card Payments Online!" and other common advertising taglines and formats. The messages that the filters catch will stay in your Message Center (and out of your inbox!) for up to 14 days before being automatically deleted. You can log into your message center as often or as infrequently as you like just to make sure no valid non-spam messages were inadvertently quarantined. The junk that accumulates in your Message Center can be ignored, deleted all at once with "Remove All Messages", or individually deleted as you see fit.
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Can I just reply to the spams to unsubscribe, or use the "Unsubscribe" link they provide?
Generally, the worst thing you can do is reply to a spam message, despite the fact that they nearly include bogus "unsubscribe" instructions in their mailings. The reason for this is that by responding to the message, you are showing the spammer that your address is valid and being read by a human who is capable of acting on what they read. This makes your address infinitely more valuable to the spammers, and they often increase the number of mailings to known good addresses, or sell lists of such addresses to other spammers. To reduce the amount of junk mail you are receiving, it is best to set your filters to the most aggressive setting possible via your Message Center .
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Why is my own address on the "From" Line of a spam message?
Most spammers try to disguise themselves by forging the "From" address with either a nonexistent address or the address of an innocent party. They also usually send one message out to many thousands of addresses at one time, and of course you will realize that these messages are not sent individually, one-by-one, to all those thousands of people. Thousands of addresses are also generally not listed individually in the "To" line. It has been my experience that most spammers make use of some type of mailing list program to send their unwanted advertisements. Mailing list programs work by designating one address to be an alias to a list of many other addresses, so that when mail is sent to the designated address, a copy of the message also goes to every address on the spammers' hidden list. Also, many times the headers of a spam message may be faked or forged, which would allow the spammer to hide the recipients' addresses and send a message with a nonsense address on the "To" line, or even with a blank "To" line.
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