Spam Filtering
Best Practices
Senders of spam e-mail often "harvest" e-mail addresses in a variety of ways. Here are a few tips to help reduce the amount of spam you receive:
- Only give out your e-mail address when absolutely necessary. Don't give it out in connection with any non-campus related contests or product inquiry. Be cautious when entering your e-mail address on web pages that ask for it. Even large, well-established organizations may sell your e-mail address to spammers.
- Establish a "spam account" on a service like Hotmail or Yahoo Mail and use that account when you must enter an e-mail address on the web or in a newsgroup posting.
- When you must provide your e-mail address on a web page, make sure you have unchecked all of the boxes indicating that you want to receive solicitations via e-mail.
- Clicking on the "unsubscribe" link on most spam e-mail usually results in getting MORE spam and is therefore not recommended.
Spam FAQ
How do I take advantage of the Spam Tagging service?
As part of the UCR e-mail system, Computing and Communications has deployed a very effective spam detection and tagging system. An increased need for the level of protection from Spam and any unwanted e-mail, has required a continual evolution of anti-spam products to safeguard UCR email systems. The C&C spam tagging system provides a high percentage of correctly identified messages being tagged as spam. It accomplishes this by checking all incoming mail and rating each one with a number, when the number reaches a certain point a separate header tag will be inserted into the e-mail. This tag makes it easy to create a filter allowing your e-mail client to automatically move those messages to a spam folder. The added tag to the header will be this:
X-Junkmail: UCE
Based on this added line to the e-mail header it will be easy to filter out these messages in your e-mail client (e.g. Eudora or Outlook) into a separate “Spam” folder using the filtering tools of the client. More information about client filtering
Filtering can also be done at the server-level by using the filtering capabilities of the Webmail@UCR system. If this server-level filtering is used you will not download the spam mail into your e-mail client (e.g. Eurdora, Outlook etc.), it will be sent into a spam folder on the e-mail server in your account. More information about webmail filtering
A feature of the C&C email system is two settings in the web mail interface whereby you can establish “Allow Lists” of those e-mail addresses or domains you always want sent through to you, even if the system thinks it is Spam. Or, you can create “Block Lists” of those e-mail addresses or domains you never want sent through to you, even if the system does not tag it as spam.