How Junk Email and Spam are Handled at UNR
Is junk mail overflowing your email box? It's easy to identify and delete with the University's "Likely Spam" rating. (Photo by: Microsoft clip art)
Tuesday, November 28, 2006
By: Aron Smetana, Director of Campus Computing
The University of Nevada, Reno offers central email services for faculty and staff through Information Technology (IT) Division email servers. Two email servers are available for faculty and staff: Microsoft Exchange and a UNIX-based IMAP email server named “Twilight.”
Both are standards-compliant and reside behind the University’s mail “gateways,” which provide virus scanning, spam-identification, and mail routing.
Junk Email and Spam Notification
When email arrives at the UNR mail gateways (which connect to the Internet to receive and send mail from the outside world), incoming mail is scanned for viruses and the probability of spam or junk mail in the mailings received.
Based on a highly complex set of rules, if there is a high probability that a message is spam, it is sent to its destination (the University employee) with an alert. IT-operated mail systems DO NOT reject messages; IT only identifies a mailing as likely spam.
Suspect messages are designated with a prefix in the subject line of “LIKELY SPAM,” followed by a spam score and then the original subject line. The message “headers” (normally not viewable in most mail clients by default) are appended as well.
Exchange users who receive messages with a high probability of being spam (e.g., those with a score of 5.5 or higher) have these likely spam messages sent automatically to the user’s Outlook “Junk Email” folder.
Twilight users do not have any automatic filtering. Such settings are configurable by the user by referring to documentation on the IT Web site.
Additional Options for Mail Filtering
Email software packages on user machines vary widely. MS Outlook, Apple Mail, Thunderbird, Entourage, etc. include options for filtering mail suspected of being spam (junk) email. These programs have defaults with spam filtering enabled and users should be sure to check and see if those are enabled. These settings may relegate mailings to junk mail based on more stringent criteria than the centralized efforts. It is good practice to review your "Junk Email" folder periodically to be sure that messages have not been misidentified.
Users may also wish to adjust the sensitivity of their local software settings to avoid legitimate email misidentified as junk mail or spam. Unless a user has a full understanding of the filtering of their junk mail rules of their local software, IT generally recommends disabling these rules and relying on the campus-based rules whenever possible.
More information on enabling filters is available at the Email Options page on the IT Web under “Spam Filtering.”
