Spam Scanning Services

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UCSC Email Spam Scanning Service

Information Technology Services (ITS) uses a multi-layered method to protect your UCSC email account from unwanted spam:

• We block and bounce email as it arrives if it comes from well-known spamming sites (the sender will get a message explaining why their mail is not accepted).
• We also scan all incoming mail for typical patterns found in spam messages, and we score them before delivering them to your mailbox.

Create a Filter for Spam

To create a CruzMail Spam Filter, follow the directions at: CruzMail Spam Filter

How is Spam Identified?

Campus email administration uses the product SpamAsssassin to scan incoming email. SpamAssassin assigns scores to each email message based on each element of "SPAM likeliness" the message has. The scores are added up and any score above a specified level are identified as spam. This means that fewer email messages will be incorrectly labeled as spam. The tradeoff is that more email messages that are actually spam will likely be missed by the scanning service. For a detailed description of how SpamAssassin evaluates and scores email, please refer to the SpamAssassin site's list of spam classification tests. Messages that (appear to) originate from UCSC email addresses (@ucsc.edu) are not scanned or marked as spam. What happens when a email message is spam? When the scanner scores a message above the "spam" threshold, three things happen: The subject of the message is prepended with the text: {SPAM?} as a visual indicator that the scanner suspects this message to be spam. Some headers are added to the message indicating its Spam score. The message is delivered to the recipient(s).

Reducing Spam