• 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