SCS SPAM Filter Service Announcement

Dear SCS Faculty, staff, and students,

The Computer Center is pleased to announce a new SPAM (unsolicited e-mail) filtering service for all SCS e-mail users. This filtering is being done with SpamAssassin; more information about this software is available at http://spamassassin.taint.org/. Filtering began Friday morning, August 30th.

With this new system, all e-mail tagged as being SPAM will be saved to a mailbox called "SPAM" in your SCS e-mail account. This mailbox will be accessable through "pine" from the UNIX shell, or via webmail at https://www.scs.uiuc.edu/webmail/. All such e-mail will be kept for two weeks, and then deleted. While no email has been mistakenly tagged as spam during testing, in certain rare conditions a message could be misidentified as spam, so you should check your spam folder every couple of weeks.

If you do not wish to have these filters applied to your e-mail account, you can opt out of this service by running the command "touch ~/.no-spam-filter" at the UNIX prompt in your SCS account. If you would like assistance opting out or have further questions, please contact Dan at dtwright@uiuc.edu or call 333-1728.

We have deliberately set the SPAM threshold relatively low system-wide to prevent false poitives. If you would like to change the SPAM threshold for your account, edit the file ".spamassassin/user_prefs" in your home directory and put in a line that says "required_hits 10", where "10" is the threshold above which an e-mail will be considered SPAM.

Please note that this will only be effective on your e-mail account if you recieve your e-mail at your SCS e-mail account; if it is forwarded to another account, these filters will not have any effect for you. If you have any questions, please call Dan at 333-1728.

Thank you,

Dan