As of spring 2006, we process our email through MCOE's anti-spam and anti-virus filters before it arrives at our mail server. As a result, some legitimate email is held in the filter until you login and designate that email as SPAM, WHITELIST, DELIVER, etc. You can also add email addresses from your address book to your personal whitelist so messages from these people are not trapped in the filter, but are delivered directly to your mailbox.

At the bottom of this page are General Information notes on the filter and how to use it. If you are a new employee to the district, you will receive an email from MCOE with your "quarantine" password. If you discard this email, you can only access your account by clicking on the link near the bottom of the periodic emails you will get from MCOE when you have email in the filter.

More recents comments and tips on improving the filtering capacity are just below in the "update" notes.

Update: 6/16/06
I found there was still some spam getting through (although at a greatly reduced level) and it was difficult to mark it as "spam" for the MCOE filter after it had arrived. Here is something you can try:

After you log into your Quarantine window, go to PREFERENCES and then SPAM SETTINGS.
Set "Use System Defaults" to "No." Click "SAVE Changes"
Change your own settings to:
Tag Score=0.0; Quarantine=0.0; Block Score=9.0
(See screenshot below.)
Click "SAVE Changes" again.

This seems to drive anything that is not on your whitelist into the Quarantine where you can then assign it as "spam" or "not spam" to train the filter.

General Information:
In an effort to reduce the amount of spam and junk email, we have joined the Monterey County Office of Education in its anti-spam program.

Beginning 5/12/06, all email coming into the pgusd.org system will pass through a filter which uses 10 checks on each piece of email to assign it a score. If the score is high enough, the email is sent to a quarantine area. (Except for emails blocked due to unacceptable content or viruses, which are deleted.)

You can then access that quarantine area with a browser such as Explorer, Netscape, Firefox, Safari etc. You will see a list of the quarantined emails

As the user you can "deliver", "delete", "whitelist" or re-classify those emails. This will allow you to create a list of email addresses which can always send you email and block future emails from addresses that have sent you junk. In short order you can teach your quarantine settings what to allow and what to block.

The first time you have an email quarantined, you will get a login and password to use in the Quarantine Area. You can change this initial password after you login to check the email list.

On a regular basis, which you can set in your "preferences", the MCOE system will send you a quarantine notification. (and only if you have items in the quarantine area.)

Click here to download a PDF file with more specific instructions. (If you ask for help, we will first ask if you have read your quide!...and then help you as much as possible.)

Any questions regarding the system or how to use the quarantine are to be directed to Bruce Cates: bcates@pgusd.org or 646-6637.

DO NOT email or call MCOE. They are offering this service on the basis that we will handle our own support.