Ordering the rules

The order in which the message level rules are performed is significant in terms of the impact on Praetor performance and how many valid messages are rejected or quarantined as spam (the so-called false positives). As an administrator, your job is to find a balance for your organization to minimize the false positives while accurately identifying spam and attaining high message processing volume from Praetor.

To understand the balance, consider what happens if the conditions are too general. This would result in better Praetor performance because it will be able to determine whether or not to reject the message as spam very early on, within the first few rules. The price for this, however, is that there may be a large number of false positives, which means the intended recipients do not get many of their messages. In contrast, if the rules were very specific and there were many of them for Praetor to perform against each message, then the number of false positives would be reduced significantly, but Praetor would spend a longer time on each message, checking it against the many rules.  Keep in mind that messages that survive the rule filtering must be checked against all the rules.  For a discussion on this, please read this.

When you have several rules involving the same condition(s), some are made more specific by adding other conditions.  In these situations, the general suggestion is to order the more specific rules to be processed first. You do this by positioning them above others by highlighting the rule you wish to re-position and using the or button on the toolbar accordingly or using the right-mouse click to select the Move up or Move down menu item.

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