6.9.1 ORF Online Help
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Table of Contents

Sender Whitelist


Use the Sender Whitelist to exclude emails from specific email senders or domains from filtering manually. Emails from these senders are ignored by ORF. By adding your business partner's email addresses and/or domains to this list, you can guarantee that their emails will not be blacklisted by ORF.

The list is available under WhitelistsSender Whitelist in the left navigation pane.

Using the Sender Whitelist

Validate the sender before whitelisting the email

Use this to verify whether the sender is actually authorized to send emails on behalf of the domain it claims to represent and not just spoofing it to bypass filtering: If the sending domain has a published SPF policy, the email must "pass" the SPF evaluation in order to be whitelisted.

Whitelist Delivery Status Notifications

Delivery Status Notifications (DSNs) report email delivery events, like delivery errors. A subtype of DSNs is the Non-Delivery Report (NDR) which reports failed delivery. DSNs are sent with a blank sender address (also called the NULL sender).

It is an RFC standard requirement that servers must accept emails with the NULL sender. If this option is enabled, ORF whitelists all emails with blank senders to keep your server compatible with standards, but this option is disabled by default, because high number of spammers exploit this (i.e., they send spam with blank sender address to avoid filtering). It is recommended to have this option disabled.

Sender Whitelist modes

Select the "Exclude only the list below from filtering" option if you want to whitelist emails only from those senders that are present on the list. If you want to whitelist every emails, except from those senders that are on the sender whitelist, select "Exclude all addresses from filtering, except the list below".

Adding, modifying and deleting addresses

Click the New button to add an email address or email address expression to the list. To modify an existing email address expression, click Modify or hit Enter. Clicking either of these buttons will invoke the Email Address Expression Dialog in which the entries can be edited. Email address expressions can be deleted using the Delete button or the Delete key.

Sorting the Sender Whitelist

Click the column header of any column by which you wish to sort the Sender Whitelist. To reverse sorting, click the column header again.

Exporting and importing the Sender Whitelist

Right-click on the list and select "Import list..." or "Export list...". Alternatively, you can do this from the menu: select FileImportSender whitelist... or FileExportSender whitelist....

Searching expressions in logs

Right-click on the list item or items and select "Search in logs..." to find log records that match the defined expression. Logs need to be loaded in the Log Viewer beforehand.

Using the Email Address Expression Dialog

IP addresses and IP address ranges can be edited using the IP Address List Editor dialog. The editor allows entering single IP addresses or IP address ranges which can be specified by subnet masks.

Notes

Envelope addresses

ORF works with the SMTP envelope sender address submitted during SMTP transport, while email clients like Microsoft® Outlook® show the Author (aka. MIME) sender address only stored in the email header, so make sure you are blacklisting the right email address.

The SMTP envelope and author information matches in most cases, but spammers often use different SMTP envelope and author information to confuse the recipient. It is absolutely legal to use different SMTP envelope and author address information. The Bcc: addressing, mailing lists, CRM software and other systems with automatic bounce-handling also often take advantage of this. For example, Yahoo mailing lists handle bounces automatically and their notifications are sent with SMTP envelope email addresses like [email protected] – the email client reports whoever that the email was sent by [email protected].

If you wish to blacklist the Author address displayed in the email client instead of the SMTP envelope sender address, you could do so by adding a filter expression with a Header field: From search scope to the Keyword Blacklist.

Note that the "." (dot) character in regular expressions should be escaped by adding a preceding "\" (backslash).

Copyright © Vamsoft Ltd. 2024. All rights reserved. Document ID adm-senderwhitelist, version 3.