This chapter provides step-by-step instructions for using the Microsoft Management Console (MMC) administration snap-in program to set the parameters that control Praetor. This snap-in can be conveniently invoked using the shortcut provided in the CMS Praetor G2 program group under the Windows button.
When you start it for the very first time, you will see the welcome screen below with the collapsed view in the left pane. Expanding the left pane to display the branches and leaf nodes, you will see the following screen.
Administration welcome screen
(Like all MMC snap-ins, subsequent invocations will show the left pane as you left it, highlighting your last selection.)
Note:
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The Praetor administration program screens you see in this chapter of the online manual such as the one above contains many hyperlinks to their appropriate pages. Your cursor will change as you hover over these links and pressing on any of them will jump directly to those pages. |
The various topics discussed in this section are:
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Topic |
Purpose |
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Review the various text lists used by Praetor filtering, typically at the message level. | |
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Review the various IP address lists used by Praetor filtering, typically at the SMTP protocol level. | |
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Statistical filtering technique to discriminate the spam from good messages. | |
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Inbound conditional
rules |
Review the condition-based rules that are applied to inbound or outbound messages or both. |
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Inbound global rules |
Review the rules without conditions that are applied to inbound or outbound messages or both. Useful for globally archiving messages or adding disclaimers. |
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Review the available templates from which new rules can be quickly created and modified to your specific requirement. | |
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View the Praetor script generated from all the enabled rules. | |
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Configure the heuristic analyzer. | |
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Message logs |
Review the current (real-time) message log. Search the log by creating static reports based on your criteria with sortable columns. |
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(Not shown) |
This node is normally hidden because enabling the protocol DNS Blacklist capability is vulnerable to a denial-of-service attack. This feature can, however, be enabled with help from CMS Technical Support. When the DNS Blacklist capability is enabled, this node will appear in the left pan and allows review of the current (real-time) SMTP protocol log. |
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Configure the various techniques for spam filtering. | |
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Configure the DNS Blacklist servers that Praetor will use to test the connecting IP address. | |
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Configure the domain names that Praetor will treat as local. This is used to determine the inbound/outbound direction of messages being filtered. | |
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View the license of your installed Praetor. | |
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View the CMS website. |
There are other relevant topics in this section pertaining to configuring the Windows virtual SMTP server used by Praetor G2.
If you are trying to perform a quick configuration of Praetor for the first time, you should review the various default settings on each of the configuration screens accessible via the links in the above table or the active links embedded in the figure above. This is especially true for the various lists used by Praetor's message-level filtering rules.
Note
Praetor G2 differences from previous version 1.5Many of the SMTP protocol filtering capabilities found in the previous version (IP, relay, domain, sender address) are no longer part of Praetor. This is simply because the previous version included its own SMTP server, whereas now Praetor relies upon the native virtual SMTP server that is part of the Windows OS or part of Microsoft Exchange 200x server. Thus much of these controls are performed via administration interfaces of Internet Information Services or Exchange. Remote administrationWhile individual local users can remotely view the Praetor log and take action on their personal quarantined messages, this is separate from actual remote administration of Praetor itself. To perform this remote administration you may consider the following alternatives.
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