Mail Filter (Mail Shield)

What is mail shield?

Mail Shield is a built-in part of Online Armor which is used to filter out undesirable email. This includes financial scam emails, and to a limited extent - "Spam" emails that contain links to sites on a spam blacklist.

Why is mail filtering important?

"Phishing" is the name of a scam which uses fake emails and websites to trick users into disclosing personal information. These attacks are becoming more and more common. Fraudsters and criminals want to get your bank passwords, your ebay account (provided it has a good rating!) and your computer to use for sending spam. It's big business.

The Online Armor mail filter will also check for worms and other types of trickery designed to get you to run dangerous programs. It also implements a basic spam checker.

How does mail filtering work?

Online Armor's mail filtering is mainly designed to remove financial scam emails. In order to do this, each email you receive is filtered by Online Armor. Instead of looking at a list of senders, or trying to analyse the text - Online Armor for the tricks used by scammers and, this results in a much better detection. For example, if you receive a mail which mentions the name of a bank, and this email also uses a trick - then Online Armor will display a popup alert and allow you to delete the mail. The mail itself will be modified to contain a warning.

Which email programs can be protected?

The IMAP mail filter will check mail from IMAP servers - the POP3 mail filter will check mail received from POP3 servers. This is completely automatic and does not need any setup at all.

If you don't know what IMAP or POP3 is - (it's the two main ways, aside from webmail which you can receive email) - don't worry - the mail filter works with at least Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird, The Bat, Incredemail, Eudora and many others.

Note: Webmail is currently not filtered by MailShield