In order to lessen the number of spam emails making their way into users’ mailboxes and to have a fallback should our current system fail or is removed by the University, we will soon be adding another spam filtering mechanism, called SpamAssassin, to our email system.
SpamAssassin modifies the Subject line of messages that it thinks are potentially spam by adding “[SPAM <number>]” where <number> is larger than or equal to 5. In our tests, with the default system settings, SpamAssassin did a very good job of detecting spam (of course, no spam filter is perfect).
SpamAssassin will use the same SuspectedSpam folder as our current spam filter (Puremessage) uses. The Subject lines of most messages will have SpamAssassin’s and Puremessage’s estimate of the likelihood that that email is spam. You should check your SuspectedSpam folder when this is first deployed to check that it is not too aggressive for your needs.
Manipulating the aggressiveness of spam filtering will remain the same, see our Emial and Spam Filtering page for more information.
Another announcement will be made on this website when the filtering is implemented.
