Friends and Family System reports

As you may already know, WINCOM has a new mail server that offers many features. One of the stronger features is the Friends and Family request confirmation mode. This feature is automatically enabled to all users though it can be disabled for users who do not want spam protection. The way that Friends and Family is triggered is from our spam checking system, SMITE Spam. Smite Spam gives a score to every email based on its content and gives it a certain rating. We have this rating system explained in our Surgemail help documentation.

If you were sending to a WINCOM customer and you got a Confirmation Letter:

How the Friends and Family system works is via a confirmation system. When you send an email, our mail server will generate a Confirmation Letter with a particular subject line (it has a serial number) and send it to you. You are then requested to reply to the Confirmation Letter in order to verify your email address is from a monitered source (an actual person). When our mail server receives that Confirmation Letter with the subject line unmodified, then the original held letter is then released, and future email from you will not be interupted. Thus, once you reply to the confirmation letter, your email will be delivered to the person you sent it to and mail from you will be allowed as long as the recipient wishes.

If you're a WINCOM customer and you receive a Friends and Family System, Friends and Family Report:

The Friends and Family System Reports are initally set to be sent once every day to keep you informed of what's happening with your email. Within these reports you are informed about the actions the mail server has taken on the letters delivered to you. ALLOWED means that the letter was allowed to go through to you. BOUNCED means that the letter was bounced back to the original sender. CONFIRM means that a Confirmation letter was sent to the sender. VANISHED means that the email was simply deleted and not bounced back. This action is taken on emails from known spammers. For simplicity, this document will also summarize the "messages waiting to be confirmed". These are letters for which the system is waiting for the sender to reply to the Confirmation Letter. You can bypass the Friends and Family system and Allow the sender's letter to be delivered right away.

To do so, follow these steps:

• Goto: Surgemail User Self-Account Management
• Fill in the username as your email address, and fill in your password. Click Login.
• Scroll though this list and locate the letter(s) you wish to Allow, and place a checkmark next to it/them.
• Scroll to the bottom of the Pending list and select Allow to release the letter(s) and future letter(s) from that email address. The rest can be deleted, if you select block it'll just add confusion in the Exceptions list.
• LogOut and check your email.