We here at SYNAQ are on the cusp of a new release for Pinpoint 2, release 0.16, and this single release adds new features that we feel, if not communicated properly, can cause some confusion with our users and domain administrators using the interface. This blog post is an attempt to help educate our users on these new features before we publish them to the live system.
The new features that the next release will provide, make it possible for mail recipients in an organisation to finally see what mail, if any, that was intended for them has been blocked and in addition communicate the need for these messages to be released to a domain administrator in a more streamlined and consistent process. These same mail recipients can alternatively release these messages themselves, alleviating work load on the administrators.
How does all this work? Read on to find out
Mail Recipient Release Mechanisms
The average person that receives mail through Pinpoint is not registered as a user on the interface. And for many organisations, registering every user to give them access to Pinpoint is a labour intensive task that is never finished; people leave and join companies all the time and adding yet another sign-on, sign-off process is not a task we want to burden our clients with.
To overcome this, we have developed a reporting mechanism that domain administrators can activate for a domain (we will look at these settings shortly), whereby these regular mail users on a domain will receive a daily email that lists all blocked messages, if any, that were addressed to them for the previous day.
The report that the end users receive lists all spam blocked by Pinpoint as well as all Policy Blocked messages (blocked due to reasons of size or attachment types, etc). Alongside each listed blocked mail entry is a link that the user can click labelled “Release”.
Depending on the settings the administrator has activated for the domain, this link can do one of two things:
- The message can be immediately released to the intended recipient/s.
- The message can be flagged as a “Release Request”, which will require an administrator to either accept or decline.
From the average mail recipients point of view, that is all that they will see; either released or requested for release.
Domain Administrator Settings
There obviously needs to be some control over how all this works, and these settings are controlled on a domain level. As a Domain Administrator, you can alter these settings.
Going to the Organisations module, and opening the “Edit Domain” section, you can then select which of your allowed domains you want to edit settings for.
Within this view you will see a few options related to Quarantine Report settings. The first option, “Domain administrators recieve daily quarantine reports for this domain”, remains unchanged and will affect the ability for domain administrators to receive the summary quarantine reports that has been available for a long time now. Nothing there has changed.
The next option, “Mail recipients at this domain receive daily quarantine reports”, affects the new feature for the upcoming release. If this is enabled, your regular mail users will receive a daily report (waiting for them when they come into work in the morning) with a list of the previous days blocked mail as described above.
The next section labelled “Mail Recipient Mail Release” has one option in it; “Mail recipients can release their own mail (if unchecked can only request release)”. If this option is enabled, the regular mail recipients can immediately release mail to them from the report by clicking the “Release” link in the report they get with no interaction needed by an administrator. If, however, this remains off, clicking “Release” in their report will flag that message for release instead and need to be actioned by an administrator.
In summary, for this feature to work for your domain/s, you need to enable the “Mail recipients at this domain recieve daily quarantine reports” option, and if you want users to release their own mail immediately also enable “Mail recipients can release their own mail (if unchecked can only request release)”, or not if they can only request a release.
Actioning Release Requests
There have been a number of features included to make communicating the fact that there are release requests waiting for an admin as clean and simple as possible. The first of these to note is our notification message that appears if any messages have been requested for release.
Once a mail recipient has requested a mail item for release, the Pinpoint interface will do regular checks, as well as with each page load, and then notify the logged in administrator about any Release Requests. Clicking the notification message will then load the Message Listing module with the correct filters in place to view all current Release Requests.
Each message that is waiting to be actioned has two options available to it; Accept or Decline. The Accept option will release the message to the original recipient/s of the mail and unmark the message as a Release Request (and also send an email to the original recipients that the message requested for release was released). The Decline option will simply unmark the message as a Release Request and send an email to the original recipients that the request was declined.
Thats it! All that an admin needs to do is go down the list, Accepting or Declining as he sees fit.
We Love Your Input
We would love to encourage our customers reading this to comment on this blog post if there are any questions or suggestions they would like to share (we read them all!). Alternatively, you can also email dev@synaq.com to communicate with the SYNAQ development team.