Define good senders

Symantec Brightmail Gateway treats mail coming from an address or connection in the Local Good Sender Domains and Local Good Sender IPs groups as legitimate mail. The good sender groups reduce the small risk that messages sent from trusted senders will be treated as spam or filtered in any way. By default messages from these senders are delivered normally.

Define bad senders

Symantec Brightmail Gateway supports a number of actions for mail from a sender or connection in the Local Bad Sender Domains and Local Bad Sender IPs groups. By default, messages from senders in the Local Bad Sender Domains group are deleted. By default, SMTP connections from senders in the Local Bad Sender IPs and Third Party Bad Senders groups are rejected. However, you can instead choose other actions.

Use global sender groups

By default, Symantec Brightmail Gateway is configured to use Symantec Global Good Senders and Symantec Global Bad Senders. Symantec monitors hundreds of thousands of email sources to determine how much email sent from these IP addresses is legitimate and how much is spam.

Symantec Global Good Senders consists of IP addresses known as legitimate senders based on reputation data collected by Symantec. Symantec Global Bad Senders consists of IP addresses that have sent large amounts of spam to mail servers protected by Symantec.

Both groups are continuously compiled, updated, and incorporated into Symantec Brightmail Gateway filtering processes at your site. No configuration is required for these lists. You can choose to disable either of these lists.

By default, messages from senders in the Symantec Global Good Senders group are delivered normally. By default, SMTP connections from senders in the Symantec Global Bad Senders group are rejected. However, you can instead choose other actions.

Incorporate lists managed by other parties

Third parties compile and manage lists of desirable or undesirable IP addresses. These lists are queried using DNS lookups. You can add third-party sender lists to your Third Party Bad Senders or Third Party Good Senders groups.

By default, SMTP connections from bad senders in these groups are rejected, and message from good senders in these groups are delivered normally. However, you can instead choose other actions.

Note:
Be sure to confirm the quality of a third party list before using it. Symantec is unable to resolve false positives that result from third-party lists.

Mail from an end-user's colleague is occasionally flagged as spam.

If personal good and bad sender lists are enabled for end users, the user can add the colleague's email address to their Good Senders list. To enable this capability for an end user, go to Administration > Users > Policy Groups, edit the policy group containing the end user, and click on the End User tab. The user can then add colleague@trustedco.com to their Good Senders list.

See Enabling and disabling end user settings for policy groups.

colleague@trustedco.com

Desired newsletter from a mailing list is occasionally flagged as spam.

Add newsletter.com to the Local Good Sender Domains group.

See Adding senders to administrator and third party sender groups.

latest@newsletter.com

An individual is sending unwanted mail to people in your organization.

Add Joe.unwanted@getmail.com to the Local Bad Sender Domains group.

See Adding senders to administrator and third party sender groups.

Joe.unwanted@getmail.com

Numerous people from a specific range of IP addresses are sending unsolicited mail to people in your organization.

After analyzing the received headers to determine the sender's network and IP address, add 218.187.0.0/255.255.0.0 to the Local Bad Sender IPs group.

See Adding senders to administrator and third party sender groups.

See Supported methods for identifying senders.

218.187.0.0/255.255.0.0