Many of you probably have encountered the term "spam" with regard to unsolicited commercial e-mail or other unpleasant bulk e-mailings. There have been many discussions about this, both in the media and locally on campus. With the onslaught rising to overwhelming proportions, Information Resources is in the process of deploying flexible solutions to facilitate efficient handling of this spam.
A recent article reveals most email on the Internet is now spam:
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105_2-1012418.html
Instead of outright blocking or deleting e-mail determined to be spam, the campus e-mail routing infrastructure will "tag" messages suspected to be spam. This tagging will take the form of lines added to the portion of the message known as the "message header", the portion containing all the routing information for that message.
Folks on both Exchange and Cyrus will then be able to leverage these new headers to handle this spam as they see fit. If so desired, it will even be possible to adjust this disposition according to the"spam level", or the likelihood that the message is spam.
An important point to stress is the concept of "false positives", messages marked as spam even though technically they are not. Accurately identifying spam is a complicated and ever-changing task. Spammers are investing tremendous resources to ensure that their messages are not intercepted. When determining how to dispose of your messages marked as spam, it will be important to periodically verify that no messages have been misclassified.
Remediation/Spam-blocking Techniques at UTD
Now for some links detailing how you can filter out this spam from your inbox. The following document describes how to configure Outlook to filter spam:
http://www.utdallas.edu/ir/tcs/techsupp/spam.htm
This is the method required for Exchange users.
NOTE: If you or a tech from IR has previously set up spam filtering in Outlook, you will need to review the instructions above and make sure your configuration matches the one described. In particular, make sure you are NOT using the "X-Spam-Status" field.
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Those with an inbox on Cyrus can utilize the server-side e-mail filtering language called Sieve as follows:
http://faq.utdallas.edu/showquestion.php?index=333
The link above describes how to manage your Sieve scripts, and contains a link to specifically filter spam.
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If you encounter mail that was not properly identified as being spam, the link below details how to extract the necessary message information from Outlook so that you can submit a complete report to spam@utdallas.edu.
http://faq.utdallas.edu/showquestion.php?index=232
When submitting a spam report, it is very important to include the full message headers.
Finally, where did this term "spam" come from, anyway? Also, the legal use of this term: