• There's not much we can do to prevent people from sending it to you
• You can use our filtering service to reduce it, if you like (see below)
• There's a lot more information at the OIT Spam information page and at CAUCE (Coalition against Unsolicited Commercial Email)

We now run the SpamAssassin filter on all incoming messages to our mail system. SpamAssassin simply assigns each message a “score”, based on the content.

• Messages with a score of 5 or less are left alone
• Messages with a score between 5 and 8 have the text SPAM added to their subject line befrore being delivered.
• Messages with a score over 8 are rejected.

However, we will be checking the results of our spam scoring over time, and shall probably revise some of these thresholds downwards.

You can change settings within your account to take further action based on this score, such as move messages to a different folder, or even delete them completely.

These settings are made within the Physics webmail system. As an example, let's say you want to filter those messages with scores with 6 or higher, so they are placed into a separate folder instead of your INBOX.

• After logging in to the webmail system, click on Filters
• Click on Add a New Rule
• Under Condition change the first drop-down box which says To: or Cc to X-Spam-Level
• In the text box after contains enter

  ******

  (that is, 6 stars)

• Under Action choose Move message into and select a folder name as the destination. Don't choose the global “spam” or “notspam” folders, as this is not their intended purpose - see below for more on these folders.
• Under Additional actions, check STOP: If this rule matches, do not check any rules after it.
• Click Add New Rule

You can see the set of rules which triggered a spam tag for a particular message in the header “X-Spam-Status”, and the list of SpamAssassin's default scores can be found here: spam_default_scores

Sometimes, SpamAssassin will misidentify a message, so that a message which is clearly spam receives a low score, or vice versa.

You can help to train our mail server to recognise spam better by copying misidentified messages to the global “spam” or “notspam” folders on the mail server.

<note important> Before you try using this, read the instructions below carefully! </note>

• Copy spam messages which spamassasssin failed to label as spam into the “spam” folder.
  • Don't copy any messages in here which already have SPAM in the subject - SpamAssassin already detected them!
  • Don't copy messages into here just because you didn't want them. We've found bulk emails from the University copied in here, as well as circulars from real companies with clear unsubscription directions; even physics-related mailing list material. None of these are spam - don't place them in here!
• Copy regular messages which spamassasssin wrongly thought were spam into the “notspam” folder

Both these folders are “write-only” - you can copy messages into them (for example, by dragging within Thunderbird), but you can't actually open the folders or read messages from them.