Filtering Spam
Step 3: Filtering Spam
When someone sends email to you, it is automatically checked by our mail server to make sure it does not contain a computer virus. In addition to this, all mail is run through a program called SpamAssassin. SpamAssassin checks the message using a wide range of rules to attempt to determine if the message is spam. While no method of spam checking is perfect, we have found SpamAssassin is accurate over 99% of the time in identifying junk mail.
By default, SpamAssassin will tag any email it believes is junk mail. In order to really use this, however, you'll need to set up some method of filtering out the mail that is tagged. There are two primary ways of doing this.
- Server Side Filtering - if you typically read your email on one of our unix machines (using pine, mutt, Sun Mail, elm, etc) or if you read your email using Webmail or an IMAP client, you'll want to do it this way. Basically this method causes the mail to be filtered before you read it.
- Client Side Filtering - If you read your mail using an email client with POP, you'll want to set up your client to filter the mail after it downloads it. This way, you'll have access to the filtered mail in your mail program.
Server Side Filtering
Server side filtering is automatically used for all departmental email accounts. To set options such as whitelisting (safe addresses), blacklisting (banned addresses) and more, please visit our spam assassin configuration page located here
Client Side Filtering
Another option is using client side filtering. This is a good option if you read your mail via POP (Eudora/Outlook/Apple Mail/etc) because you can filter the mail into a local mailbox on your machine. To do this, there is nothing that has to be done under your account. All you will need to do is configure your email client to use it's built in filtering to filter messages who have the header "X-Spam-Status" that is "Yes" or a subject that contains "(*SPAM*)". Because of the large number of email clients used, we cannot provide specific instructions on how to do this, please consult the documentation or help for your email client.
Forwarding your email with SpamFiltering
The traditional way to forward your email is to enter a forwarding address in a .forward file in your account. However, doing this will cause the email to be forwarded before any spam is filtered out. If you would like to forward your email to another address after spam filtering is done, you can do so by adding the following to your .procmailrc:
:0c
* ^X-Spam-Status: No
! someone@somewhere.com
This will forward all non-spam email to someone@somewhere.com, leaving a copy in your math account. To do this without leaving a copy in your math account, remove the 'c' from the first line.