Managing incoming email is a pain. A real pain. The problem is it’s a job that is needed to be done. Every morning there are hundreds upon hundreds of quarantined emails to wade through, just in case one is a false positive. A false positive, for those who aren’t sure, are emails that are genuine but for whatever reason have been flagged by the email filter as being potentially undesirable. The clue here is the word potentially.

The product we use is Clearswift Mailsweeper for SMTP which on the whole does a pretty reasonable job of detecting undesirable mail. In the early days, as I have mentioned before in this blog, we used to block at the perimiter any sender that was in a blacklisted list such as spamhaus or xBL lists. The problem was we missed a number of valuable orders so since then we have had to let them through to quarantine level. Just as I’ve finished a session I click on refresh, turn my back for a moment then find a dozen or so more waiting.

Add to this the fact that we delay all outgoing mail, in case of accidental sending, and have to manually release those then it adds up to quite a task.

After using Mailsweeper for sometime there are a number of features that would be useful, including:

a. The ability to right click on the sender of the email and automatically add them to either a whitelist or blacklist.

b. The ability to right click on words in the subject list and add them to a watchword list.

c. One-click release or delete of mail rather than clicking a check box, clicking release, then having to confirm the action in a pop-up box is a real drag.

d. A button to automatically release outgoing email that has been waiting 10 minutes or more.

e. an Undelete option when I’ve deleted a valuable order by accident (it happens!)

f. An undo option in case I press the wrong button … oops.