Policy Guide › Best Practices › Excluding Emails By Sender

Excluding Emails By Sender

An organization often generates emails from one or more general sender mailboxes. These emails occasionally trigger policy and are usually of no interest to the reviewers. It therefore makes sense to exclude these senders from policy. There are several approaches:

• Create a custom CA DataMinder account for the sender and disable policy

  If the sender matches an existing CA DataMinder user account, you can simply disable policy for the sender. You may therefore want to create a custom CA DataMinder user to represent one or more of the system mail senders.

  For the example email above, you could create a CA DataMinder user called AutoSenders and assign the address announcement@globalcorp.com to this account. You can now disable policy for this user by editing the user’s policy directly or editing policy for the group that contains this user.

• Exclude senders from policy by using Data Lookup commands

  If it is not practical to include the sender in the hierarchy, you can use data lookups to exclude the sender. This is normally the case when the sender is external. Depending on the scope of the excluded addresses, there are several valid approaches.

  • If the sender has a specific address, use:

    msgattr where %sender% IS {"announcement@globalcorp.com"}
    

    If you want to exclude a specific internal sender, then the above command may not be sufficient. Typically, you need to specify the sender's EX address (this is the protocol used internally by Microsoft Outlook). For example:

    msgattr where %sender% IS {"/o=globalcorp/ou=us/cn=announcement"}
    

    Alternatively, use the following example to cover all possibilities:

    msgattr where %sender% IS ANY {"announcement@globalcorp.com","/o=globalcorp/ou=us/cn=announcement"}
    

    Note: The Retrieve Full Sender Details For Emails? setting in the user policy is the key determinant on how sender addresses are handled. By default, this setting is True, meaning that CA DataMinder retrieves all the sender's address aliases.

  • If you want to exclude a few specific sender addresses, you can specify a comma separated list of addresses:

    msgattr where %sender% IS {"announcement@globalcorp.com", "hr@globalcorp.com",…}
    

  • If there are many potential sender addresses that you want to exclude, and this list is used by multiple triggers, we recommend a user definition:

    msgattr where %sender% IS ANY {"%ExcludedSenders%"}  
    

    Here, %ExcludedSenders"% is a user definition, included in each user’s policy, that specifies a long list comma separated list of addresses.

  • For very large lists of external addresses, such as spam senders, you can also use a custom CA DataMinder user account in a custom user group. You must then assign all the spam sender addresses that you know about to that user account. This allows you to use a User Attribute lookup command to exclude members of this custom group from policy. In the example below, the custom CA DataMinder user is a member of the WhiteList user group:

    userattr with %sender% WHERE Wgn.Group IS NOT {"WhiteList"}
    

Note: When refining your Outgoing Email triggers, external senders are represented in the CA DataMinder user hierarchy by the ExternalSender user account. If you want to apply Data Lookup filters to external senders, make sure you edit the triggers for the ExternalSender user