Computer Faq
Many of you have emailed or called to get some questions answered. The OIT Helpdesk, 2-4000, is prepared to answer these email filtering questions about this product but my team can help also. Here are a few quick tips that may help you with your personal email filtering.
1. When you login to the emailfilter.byu.edu site, you are only filtering email for your personal BYU Outlook account. The changes you make only affect you and no one else.
2. In the "Status" section on the right hand side you will see a drop down box. Here is a brief tip of what each option means:
- Accept Message – this will allow the email to go into your inbox this time only.
- Whitelist Sender – This makes the sender of the email a "valid" email you want to have come through each time.
- Whitelist Domain – This makes the whole domain (i.e. @yahoo.com) a "Valid" domain and anything from this domain you want to receive.
- Whitelist Network – Don’t concern yourself with this one.
- Reject Message – This will reject this specific email just this once.
- Blacklist Sender – This will reject any emails that come from a particular sender. **Note** Some senders get around this by changing their email address often.
- Blacklist Domain – This will reject any emails coming from a certain domain. (i.e. @ksl.com) **Note** Use this wisely because you will block everything that is associated with the domain.
- Blacklist Network – Do not worry about this option.
3. One quick way to get rid of a whole page of junk email all at once is to click on the red circle with an X in it. If you know that all the emails on the current page you are looking at are junk, click on the red circled X. Then hit "Submit Changes". This will reject all the emails on that page. If you want to keep some or blacklist others you need to do it manually for each one and then hit the Submit Changes button.
4. One of the best tips is to setup your Preferences. Here you can setup a simple notification at the certain time and whatever days you would like. What this does is on the time you have selected you will receive an email showing all the blocked emails you have gotten since the last notification. This is a quick way to go through the list, keep the ones you want and mark the rest as spam. If they are all spam, you simply hit the "reject all as Spam" option at the bottom and they all go away. You can change the number of entries you see (default is 100. For e I like to see more so my filter gets cleaned out quickly).You select a time or times. (You can select more than one time a day to let you know what is being blocked). Also you can select what days you want to be notified.
5. You can also go into the Rules section and setup rules on how you want certain emails to be handled. This is where you can tell the email filtering system that certain emails, senders, or domains you wan to the Accept or Reject. This is a good way if you want to always receive email from a certain magazine, newspaper or other critical emails pertaining to your research needs. The chart below gives you an example of what it looks like.
All computers should have the Symantec Anti-Virus software. Here are some simple instructions to help you update your virus checker, check to see if any viruses have been found, and learn how to run a virus check on your computer in "Safe Mode:" Open up Symantec Anti-Virus. Check to see if the "Virus Definition Pattern" is up-to-date. If it is not, click on the "Live Update" button. Click on the default buttons ("Next," "Next," "Finish.") This will get your virus checker up-to-date. Next, go to the left hand side and find the option to "View". Click on the little "+" sign next to it. This will open up some other options. Check the ones that say: "Quarantine," "Backup Items," and "Repaired Items." If you find a "Risk" located within one of these, you can click on the file name to highlight it and then click on the red "X" to delete it. Next, run a full virus scan. You can do this while in Windows and it should pick up any viruses your computer may have. If you think you are still having problems that a virus is causing, do the following: Restart your computer. When you see the "Dell" screen come up, hit the "F8" button. You may need to hit it a couple of times. This should bring up a screen of different log-in options. Select the top option that says "Safe Mode". This will run windows in a "stripped down" format. Viruses can’t operate in this mode. Once you are in the "Safe Mode", go through the steps to run a full virus scan again on your computer. This should clean any remaining problems off your computer. Once it is done, remove any problems you may have found and then reboot the computer.
Many of you have probably seen a pop-up come on your computer screen that tells you viruses have been found on your computer (generally, the pop-up tells you there are 50-100 or more). The pop-up tells you to click on the button within the pop-up to have the application clean off the viruses. The problem is when you click on this button, you have just installed a virus to your computer. The best option is to close the pop-up down without clicking on anything. The way to do this is hit the following button sequence: ALT F4. These key strokes will close down the application that is currently open. Now should you see a pop-up coming from Symantec or from the currently anti-virus program that you have installed on your computer telling you that a virus has been found, then you should run a virus scan on your computer. Follow the instructions above to take care of this. Here is an illustration of what to beware of when a potential virus "pop-up" shows up on your computer.
This is a tough one. I have heard two trains of thoughts on this.
- If you click on the unsubscribe option, whoever sent you the email will know that this is a VALID email address. Then you may get plastered with even more junk email.
- If you click on the unsubscribe option, the company or person sending it is suppose to take you off by law. Here is what I normally do. If I get some junk mail from an actual company that I have heard of, or that I can Google and see that they are legit, then I unsubscribe. If it is coming from some random “reply to” email address (such as someone’s personal gmail, yahoo, or other account), I usually send those to my junk email and forget about them. It is really hard to decide whether to unsubscribe or just send to email to the junk folder and hope they stop sending them to you because you have not responded.