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Joe St Sauver, Ph.D.
Director, User Services and Network Applications
joe@uoregon.edu
Our spam filtering has now improved with the addition of a new weapon in the war on spam, SpamAssassin. SpamAssassin looks at a variety of characteristics associated with each message, including known spamvertised websites and message formatting characteristics associated with known spamware, and combines all those rules to give each message a SpamAssassin spam score. (You can see a full list of SpamAssassin tests at http://spamassassin.apache.org/tests.html .)
By default, messages with a SpamAssassin score of 5 or higher are considered to be spam, while messages with scores below 5 are not. Although all uoregon.edu messages receive SpamAssassin scores automatically, nothing gets filtered based on those scores unless you enable SpamAssassin filtering for your account by visiting https://password.uoregon.edu/spam/
Most users will want to use the default values on that page, which will result in mail with a SpamAssassin score of 5 or higher being put into a spam folder on your account. Periodically check that folder to make sure wanted mail hasn't accidentally been scored as spam.
1. Most Users:
Visit https://password.uoregon.edu/spam/ and set up your account to use both Source Based Spam Filtering and SpamAssassin filtering using the default values.
2. Users who have had problems with wanted mail being blocked:
Visit https://password.uoregon.edu/spam/ and disable Source-Based Spam Filtering. Enable Filtering With SpamAssassin (optional).
3. Users having problems with SpamAssassin flagging wanted mail as spam:
Visit https://password.uoregon.edu/spam/ and change the threshold value from 5 to some larger value (you'll see more spam slip through, but there will be less chance of a real message being erroneously scored as spam).
OR… List the email addresses you'd like to whitelist at https://password.uoregon.edu/spam/whitelist.html (note that this whitelisting affects only SpamAssassin filtering; it does not affect source-based spam filtering).
4. POP users:
We'd encourage all POP email clients to consider migrating from POP to IMAP. However, if you're using a POP email client and want to use SpamAssassin, you should be aware that your POP mail program only recognizes one mail folder, your default inbox. Thus, if you set SpamAssassin to move spammy looking mail into a separate spam folder, you'll need to periodically use some other mail program (such as the UO's web email interface) to see what's in that folder.
As an alternative, some POP users may prefer to change their SpamAssassin Delivery Option to deliver spam to the normal inbox, relying on the SPAM tag and SpamAssassin score to help manage any unwanted email.
Q. Do I need to manually create my spam folder?
A. No. SpamAssassin
automatically creates the spam folder when you receive spam.
Q. Do you automatically empty the spam folder?
A. No. You will need to manually delete any unwanted mail from the spam folder
yourself.
Q. If I receive spam and SpamAssassin tags it, do I still need to report
it to you?
A. No. If SpamAssassin is tagging the unwanted mail, we consider it handled.
Q. I'd like to see the SpamAssassin scores that result in a message receiving
the score it got. How can I do that?
A. If you enable full headers
(http://micro.uoregon.edu/fullheaders/) you'll see the raw SpamAssassin
headers, including the score the message received on each triggered test.
Q. I'm comfortable editing my SpamAssassin configuration. Can I do so?
A. Yes. If you're comfortable editing your SpamAssassin configuration
you're welcome to do so. However, we recommend that most users use the
web interface instead.
Q. Is Bayesian filtering enabled?
A. Due to software incompatibilities, we won't be able to do Bayesian filtering
until we complete decommissioning the old legacy Darkwing Solaris server.
We expect to have completed that migration work by this summer.
Q. I tried SpamAssassin but I don't like it! How do I turn it off?
A.
Visit https://password.uoregon.edu/spam/ and
deselect the filtering you don't like. Please allow up to an hour for the changes
to take effect.
If you're a UO faculty member, student, or staff person and you have any questions about the new SpamAssassin spam filtering service, feel free to contact me at joe@uoregon.edu or 346-1720.