Parental Moderation

Description:

This feature allows parents to moderate or monitor the email sent to their children, and to maintain lists of allowed and disallowed senders (whitelist, goldlist, and blacklist) as messages arrive. Parents have complete control over their children's spam filters, and children cannot change their settings.

In order to use this feature, you must first contact our helpdesk and have your family relationships created. Each parent has a unique list of children, and each child has a unique list of parents, so you can have as many moderators and moderated users as you like.

Overview:

This feature works by intercepting messages sent to children that got through all of the filters without being approved or rejected.

If a message requires moderation, it is sent to all of the parents/guardians listed for the child as a moderation request. This message will look exactly like the message that the child would receive, except for the Subject line, which is modified to indicate that it is a moderation request.

Any of the parents may reply to this message to control delivery, and the first one to do so establishes the outcome. If all parents ignore the message entirely, it will be removed from quarantine 5 days later. Moderation can only be done from your Cotse account (or your own domain that we host) . you cannot set up a moderator with an external email address.

Instructions:

To moderate a message, simply reply to the message (notice that although it looks like it came from the original sender, the reply is going to the child's account) with any of the following keywords, and the associated actions will be taken.

The following keywords are required at the beginning of your reply to actively moderate your child's email:

• approve - approve just this message
• reject - reject just this message
• whitelist - approve this message and all further messages from the sender, not filtered
• goldlist - approve this message and all further messages from the sender, filtered
• blacklist - reject this message and all further messages from the sender

If nothing is done within 5 days, the message will be deleted. If none of the keywords are found and the message is a reply to a moderation request, the parents will be notified that the reply wasn't recognized and no action was taken. This means the message is still in quarantine and can still be approved, rejected, etc. This is done to ensure that the proper action is taken with the original message.

In addition, parents can use server commands on their children's accounts (see *server commands*). All that is required is that they send the command to the child's commands@ alias and it will be treated as a server command. Only parents can use these commands on a child's account . if a child attempts to use this alias to control an email account, the message will be discarded.

We encourage parents who want this feature to check it out and make sure they trust it to handle their child's email before giving their child access to the account. We will also be introducing numerous features to enhance parental control, and we invite any feedback or requests so we can provide our customers with the best service possible.

Once your account has a family associated with it, you will see options for moderating your family on the Options page as well as each of the filter pages. For each of your children, you can edit their sender whitelists, goldlists, and blacklists, either by using webmail or by adding keywords to your replies to moderation requests.

NOTE: you cannot create or modify your family relationships . you must ask helpdesk to do that and you will need to be able to prove your right to moderate another account.

Overview:

When a child receives an email message, it goes through the following limited set of filters: alias expiration (all accounts have this filter in front of all filters)

1. expired aliases
2. sender whitelist (using child and/or parent settings)
3. alias/destination whitelist (using child and/or parent settings)
4. text whitelist (using child and parent settings)
5. subject whitelist (using child and parent settings)
6. sender blacklist (using child and/or parent settings)
7. alias/destination blacklist (using child and/or parent settings)
8. text blacklist (using child and/or parent settings)
9. subject blacklist (using child and/or parent settings)
10. attachment blacklist (using child and/or parent settings)
11. IP address blacklist (using parent settings)
12. HTML block (using parent settings)
13. SpamAssassin (always enabled, run with parental or default settings)
14. text blacklist (second round to check for SpamAssassin headers)
15. sender goldlist (using child and/or parent settings)
16. moderation request

If the messages gets through all of the filters without being intercepted or delivered, the message is quarantined and a moderation request is sent to each of the child's parents. This email looks exactly like the original message except for the Subject line, which includes information for the moderation request.

The moderation request will be sent from the child's account to each of the parents, to an alias .mod_child. (where .child. is the name of the child's account) and replies will be sent to moderate@child.cotse.net).

Any parent may reply to the message to perform moderation, and once it has been done once, the message is no longer available for multiple actions (the first parent to reply establishes the response). The reply is sent to the child's email address, not the original sender's.

No changes made to the message in the reply will affect the message delivered to the child if the message is allowed; however, the following keywords are supported in replying if they are found at the very beginning of the reply:

• Do nothing at all . message will be deleted from quarantine after five (5) days
• Reply with the keyword approve - allow this message from this sender - message is delivered, further messages from this sender will still require moderation after filtering.
• `Reply with the keyword reject - reject this message from this sender - message is deleted, further messages from this sender will still require moderation after filtering.
• Reply with the keyword whitelist - approve this and all future messages from this sender without filtering - message is delivered, further emails will from this sender will be delivered.
• Reply with the keyword goldlist - approve this and all future messages from this sender but filter them - message is delivered, further messages will be filtered, but will pass the goldlist.
• Reply with the keyword blacklist - reject this and all future messages from this sender - message is deleted.

These keywords must be at the very beginning of the reply or they won't be matched. The rest of the reply is not used . if the message is to be delivered to the child, it is restored from quarantine and deleted.

Once an action is taken, all of the parents are notified and the message is no longer available, so there is no risk of redundant deliveries. The first parent to approve or reject a message will cause the message to be deleted from quarantine, regardless of the action.

Example:

A message is sent to your child from a new sender that is not listed in any filters, so it is sent for parental moderation. You and all other parents of this child will receive a message that appears in every way just like the original except for the Subject line. It will have the subject of the original message plus a lot more information, and will look like this:

    MOD-NAME: test msg from sender; Msg abcd.1234; MODERATION REQUIRED
    
    Where:
    * MOD-NAME
    moderation request for child NAME
    * test msg
    is the original subject in its completion (up to RFC limit) 
    * sender
    is the original sender
    * Msg abcd.1234 
    is the message ID of the original message 
    (used to identify quarantined message)
    * MODERATION REQUIRED
    indication that this message requires parental moderation
  

Do not modify the Subject of this message . it is used to identify the quarantined message and any modifications will result in errors and no moderation will be performed. To moderate the message, reply to it (notice that the reply goes to the child's moderate@ alias) with one of the required keywords listed above.

Any changes you make to the message will be lost if it is approved - only the keywords listed to moderate the message are recognized, and if the message is delivered, it is restored from the quarantined message with no indication that any moderation has been done.

For those of you familiar with using Email Commands/Server Directives, you can use the same thing on your children's account by simply sending the directive to "commands@childname.domain" just as you would to manage your own filters.

NOTE: We will soon be releasing a feature to monitor children's outgoing emails - it is still in development at this time.