What to Expect From Scora
Once you change your MX record (assuming you also reduced the TTL as requested in the Pre-Setup Guide), email will quickly start flowing through Scora. If you receive a lot of spam, you should notice a dramatic reduction in the amount making it to your inbox. The default settings will hold messages with very high spam or virus probability levels in the quarantine area. The quarantine area exists on the Scora servers, and will hold the message for a certain period of time (20 days by default). After a message has been held for 20 days, it will be deleted to make room for new messages. Since these messages that are very likely spam or viruses are held in quarantine, they don't clutter up your inbox or infect your computer.

Scora may misclassify a legitimate email message as spam (or very rarely, a virus). This misclassification is called a "false positive" since the message tested positive for spam or viral content, but the message isn't spam or a virus. To alleviate this problem, by default, each user receives a daily report that provides a little information about each message that was held in the quarantine that day. If Per-User reports are enabled, end users can review these messages to see if there are any false positives listed and release any quarantined messages if necessary by simply clicking the respective "release" links. The administrator also receives daily reports that show what was held in the quarantine for the entire domain.

By default, for messages that Scora thinks are spam but is less confident about, Scora adds "***spam***" to the beginning of the Subject line. End users can set up filters in their mail client that divert these Subject tagged messages to a different folder if they wish, or they can just sort through them in their inbox.

Scora also scans for viruses, worms, and other kinds of "malware". When Scora is reasonably confident that a message is infected, it is sent to the quarantine for safety. Keeping infected messages in the Scora quarantine keeps them away from end-users' vulnerable computers.

One feature of Scora that is still being developed is a separate set of rules that identify explicit adult content. This separate ruleset allows explicit content to be handled differently than other types of spam. The rules that identify explicit content are incomplete, so not every explicit message will be caught by them. By default, explicit messages are handled similarly to spam, with slightly more aggressive quarantining, and a different Subject tag: "***explicit***".

Advice on What Default Settings to Change
We have provided default settings that we hope will be appropriate for many Scora users. However, we provide the ability to tailor Scora to meet your organization's needs. This section provides advice on when you might want to change settings from their defaults.

If your domain has only one user that receives all the email, you may wish to turn off the daily per-user reports since you can just read the daily administrator report.

If your organization is fairly small or has end-users that can't or won't read their daily quarantine reports, you might just wish to scan the daily administrator report and look for false positives in the quarantine area without waiting for users to report them.

One major area of customization is the Filtering Options page, which allows administrators to decide at what probability level they want different actions to be taken. If the probability level assigned to an action is low (like 99%), then it will let fewer spam and viruses through but it will also increase the false positive rate. If the probability level assigned to an action is raised, it will reduce the false positive rate at the expense of letting through more spam or viruses. Each organization will have to decide what probability levels are appropriate for their users, and the needs of a 1st grade classroom will be very different from a law firm specializing in sexual harassment cases.

Administrators that are particularly worried about false positives or don't want to field end-user quarantine retrieval requests might wish to turn off the quarantine altogether and rely on Subject tagging. This means users have to sort through the messages in their mail client, but makes sure that no false positives are stuck in the quarantine where they can only be reached by the administrator.

Some organizations may wish to have the system pass through mail to certain users without filtering. You can add these users to the Exempt Users list, and messages addressed to them will go through the Scora service without action.

If you are seeing a lot of false positives, look into creating whitelist entries. The Whitelist feature allows you to tell Scora about certain sources of email that will go through the filters even if the message looks like spam. Note that for safety, the Whitelist does not apply to virus filtering, because many email viruses make it appear that they were sent from trusted correspondents.

Be careful when releasing things from quarantine until you examine them carefully. Spammers and virus writers are becoming increasingly adept at tailoring Subject lines to look like legitimate messages. Although messages in the quarantine can be configured to automatically expire, they can also be deleted manually if necessary to reduce the risk of an accidental release of malicious emails.

Where to Go For More Information
Please log into Scora to gain full access to the extensive support documentation. If this is your initial setup, visit our Quick Start Guide. On the side of every page of the Scora web interface is a short introduction to that page, and links for related documentation. There is also an online Administration guide available from the "Support" tab of the Scora interface and a Common Task section for day-to-day administration duties. You can also contact Tiki Technologies if you need further assistance.

Mahalo!

If you are setting up Scora for a domain for the first time, please proceed to the Step 1: Pre-setup, or click NEXT.