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The UF Office of Information Technology Newsletter | |
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Open Systems Group Introduces "Spam" Filtering | |
The CNS Open Systems group has recently implemented a new filtering framework for all e-mail that passes through smtp.ufl.edu to filter out Unsolicited Bulk Email (UBE) also colloquially known as "Spam".
Because each person's opinion on what is a desired e-mail varies, the spam-scoring system doesn't do anything beyond calculating the score and reporting that score to you. It is up to you to decide what action, if any, should be taken based on that score.
If your mail program has a customizable mail filtering option, you can use it to read the score and sort your mail according to your wishes. While webmail (GatorMail) does not currently have this feature, a new version of webmail that includes a spam filter option is in test and should be announced very soon. You can preview the new version from a link at webmail.ufl.edu
The spam score will be located in a line in the header area of your incoming messages. It will be called X-Spam-Level and will look like
X-Spam-Level: ****where each additional star increases the likelihood that the message is spam.
While you can set a filter to automatically delete mail that you think is spam, we strongly advise against this. If you start automatically deleting messages, some messages will probably be deleted before the next CNS e-mail backup window. There is nothing we can do to recover a lost message that was deleted in this manner. Instead, we recommend that you configure your e-mail program to automatically move these messages to a separate folder for later review and deletion, at your convenience.
You can read more about our spam detection system and about establishing mail filter rules at www.cns.ufl.edu/spam .
If you have any questions about using e-mail filters, or about controlling spam in your mailbox, please contact the UF Computing Help Desk at 352-392-HELP (2-4357). Their consultants will be happy to assist you.