WestonBlock — Weston’s Spam filtering service — allows you to tweak your own personal settings so that WestonBlock works the way you want to. In this article, we go through a few of those settings that will allow you to personalize WestonBlock to best fit your usage habits as well as give you a couple videos that show you how to use common features. This blog post covers the most common WestonBlock settings:
- WestonBlock Basic Overview (Video and Downloadable PDF)
- The Quarantine Digest (Video)
- Advanced Quarantine Digest (Video)
- How to Tweak Your WestonBlock Settings
- Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
WestonBlock Overview
We’ve compiled a basic overview PDF of WestonBlock that covers pretty much everything you’ll need to know. You can download that here. You can also watch the short video below that describes the basics and the features:
The Quarantine Digest
The quarantine digest is how you’ll primarily interact with your blocked spam. This video covers how to work with your WestonBlock Quarantine digest email that you get on a daily basis. It includes how to preview blocked messages, how to approve them one-time and how to approve the sender for future emails.
Advanced Quarantine and Logs
This video covers using more advanced features, tips and tricks of WestonBlock including reviewing the logs of email received and performing actions on them.
Tweaking Your Weston Block Settings
First off, we need to log into your personal WestonBlock page. There are two ways you can do that:
- You can click on Sign Into Your Account in a Quarantine Digest report:
- Or you can navigate to https://us1.proofpointessentials.com
Once there, put in your email address and hit “Sign In”.
First time users may have to reset their password by clicking the forgot password link under the sign-in button:
You’ll receive an email like this that you’ll need to click on the “Set Password” link to set your password:
Then you’ll be able to log into the portal.
After signing in, click on “Settings,” and you’ll see a screen that will look something like this:
Once you sign in, you’ll see a few links that you can click on to adjust your settings. Here are the important ones:
Digests allows you to view your current Quarantine Digest or request another copy of the email. You can also control settings such as when the digest is sent, what is included (all emails or only the new quarantined messages since the last quarantine digest, the latter being how WestonBlock was setup previously), and how long a quarantined mail is retained before it’s automatically deleted. In talking with clients recently, one of the biggest frustrations was having to review too many spam messages in the digest received daily. The best way to address this issue is to change your Digest setting for “Only include messages quarantined since the last Quarantine Digest was sent” to “Yes.”
Filters allow you to set up rules to control mail sent to you or mail you send. These are a bit of an advanced topic and the potential to break something in here is fairly high. If you want to try this, please get in touch with Weston.
Sender Lists allows you to specify users that are Blocked Senders or Safe Senders. Blocked Senders are always blocked by WestonBlock, and never show up in your inbox. Safe Senders are always accepted, and emails from them aren’t checked to see if they’re spam.
Emergency Inbox is useful if your email server or service is down for some reason. This allows you to access mails that are currently waiting to be delivered to your inbox.
WestonBlock Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
What is WestonBlock? It is a service to better protect you and your company from the harmful effects of unwanted email, an email protection and security service has been implemented that filters all inbound email for spam, viruses, inappropriate content and unauthorized attachments.
What Does It Looks like? You’ll primarily deal with WestonBlock via the Quarantine Digests (see above). Once an email is suspected to be a spam, it will automatically be sent to your Quarantine Digest. It is presented in this format to allow the user to safely view the message and be provided with actions to take to conveniently manage this kind of messages in the future.
What’s the difference between filter blocks and SPAM? Filter blocks prevent emails with potentially harmful attachments from being received. SPAM is unwanted and often irrelevant or unsolicited messages, typically sent in bulk, and are often used for advertising, phishing, or other unwanted purposes.
How do I find the WestonBlock Quarantine Digest? Search you email inbox for WestonBlock, if you have items in your quarantine digest, you will find one, or several emails if you have not checked them for a while, with the subject line: WestonBlock – Quarantine Digest, simply open the email and you will be taken to the quarantine digest which looks like the picture below.
How can I manage emails in quarantine? WestonBlock has various actions you can take in the digest. Once a Quarantine Digest email is received you can ignore it (It will be Automatically deleted after 30 days), or take an action depicted below:
- Preview – select this action to safely view the contents of the email.
- Release – select this action to release this email to your inbox but only do this if it was from a user, you know and were expecting email from. This will redirect you to a login page, butyou can ignore it and wait until your released email appears in your inbox.
- Release & Approve – select this action to release the email and authorize the sender’s email address to come through in the future. As above, be very careful with this as this means that this email address will now always bypass the security filters, we recommend you do this only with individual emails, NOT with entire domains.
- Block – select this action to stop receiving emails from a specific sender
Are Zip File attachments blocked? Zip files are incredibly useful for compressing files and containing collections of files. Unfortunately they’re also useful to hackers, spammers and scammers. As such, Zip file attachments are blocked by default because of the risk they present. To release risky quarantined Zip files, you will need to contact Weston for inspection and release. If you frequently receive Zip files from a known and trusted source, we can evaluate and white label certain senders.
Why can we release email detected as SPAM, but we can’t release a filter blocked item? Items blocked by a filter are typically malicious and pose a risk not only to individual computers but also to the entire company. Because of this risk, employees cannot release a filter blocked message
If you have any further questions about your WestonBlock account or how any of these or other features works, don’t hesitate to contact us.