Setting Filtering Options - McAfee INTERNET SECURITY SUITE 2008 User Manual

130 McAfee Internet Security

Setting filtering options

Adjust Anti-Spam's filtering options if you want to filter messages
more aggressively, specify what to look for in a message, and look
for specific character sets when analyzing spam.
Filtering level
The filtering level dictates how aggressively your e-mail is filtered.
For example, if spam is not filtered and your filtering level is set to
Medium, you can change it to High. However, if the filtering level
is set to High, only e-mail messages from senders in your friends
list are accepted: all others are filtered.
Special filters
A filter specifies what Anti-Spam looks for in an e-mail message.
Special filters detect e-mail messages that contain hidden text,
embedded images, intentional HTML formatting errors, and
other techniques commonly used by spammers. Since e-mail
messages that have these attributes are usually spam, the special
filters are enabled by default. For example, if you want to receive
e-mail messages that contain embedded images, you may need
to disable the special image filter.
Character Sets
Anti-Spam can look for specific character sets when analyzing
spam. Character sets are used to represent a language, including
the language's alphabet, numeric digits, and other symbols. If
you are receiving spam in Greek, you can filter all messages that
contain the Greek character set.
Be careful not to filter character sets for languages in which you
receive legitimate e-mail. For example, if you only want to filter
messages in Italian, you might select Western European because
Italy is in Western Europe. However, if you receive legitimate
e-mail in English, selecting Western European will also filter
messages in English and any other languages in the Western
European character set. In this case, you cannot filter messages in
Italian only.
Note:
Filtering messages that contain characters from a specific
character set is for advanced users.
Change the filtering level
You can change how aggressively you want to filter your e-mail.
For example, if legitimate messages are filtered, you can lower the
filtering level.
1
Open the Spam Protection pane.
How?