Definitions and Terminology

Before we begin it is important that you, the reader, are familiar with some of the terminology used throughout this documentation and the WebTool. Please read and understand the terms below before proceeding.

ACL

Access Control List. List of users who may access a feature.

Bayes Filter

A spam filtering method that classifies mail using information it has learned from previous mail.

Body

Part of email that contains the mail content excluding the Header.

Certification Authority

An entity that issues digital (X.509) certificates and vouches for the data contained in such certificates. A CA may be thought of as a trusted third party who signs certificates, making them valid.

Corpus

Large collection of spam and non-spam mail.

Domain

A domain name is a name given to a group of machines. A domain name identifes one or more IP addresses. In an email address, the part to the right of '@' is the domain name.

Envelope

The sender and recipient addresses in the SMTP transaction are called the Message Envelope. Note that these addresses do not to have to be the same as the addresses in the message headers.

Ham

Legitimate mail

Header

Information at the beginning of an email. Message headers contain the addresses of sender and recipients, the subject of the message and the date and time the message was received.

Host

Name of the machine that receive mail

Host Certificate

An X.509 certificate for a machine.

Internet Message Access Protocol

A protocol for retrieving e-mail from a mail server. Commonly referred to as IMAP, a connection remains open to the server while mail is being read. Mail is stored remotely on the server unless specified by the e-mail client to download and store the mail locally.

LDAP

Lightweight Directory Access Protocol. It is a protocol for acessing information directories such as addresses, phone numbers, etc

Mail Relay

A server that routes an email to the correct destination. Mail relays are used to forward all mail for the local domain to the mail store.

Mail Store

The server that receives and stores mail for a domain. Mail Store is the final destination for a particular domain.

MIME

Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions. It refers to an official Internet standard that specifies how messages must be formatted so that they can be exchanged between different email systems.

Post Office Protocol

A protocol for retrieving e-mail. Also referred to as POP3 (version 3), it downloads all new e-mail messages from the server and stores them locally on a users machine.

PST

Format of MS Outlook mail archives.

Remote Certificate

An X.509 certificate issued on a machine other then the local one. Remote Certificates are not signed by the local Certification Authority and are usually used to identify a machine on the other end.

Shared Key

A string (much like a password or a pass-phrase) that is shared between the TLS mail server and client used for authentication.

Simple Mail Transfer Protocol

A protocol for sending e-mail messages between servers. Also commonly referred to as SMTP.

Spam

Illegitimate bulk mail

User Certificate

An X.509 certificate for a person. A User Certificate may be associated with a local user on the machine.

Virtual Domain

A domain that exists as a software entity on the server, which doesn't need a dedicated hardware location. A server can receive mail for a virtual domain.

X.509 Certificate

The standard format for digital certificates.