Category:Spam Filtering At CS

Spam is an unfortunate fact of life on the Internet. The CS Department has several different layers of defense against spam, some of which are automatic and some of which need to be set up and configured by you before they will be useful. This category presents pages on those systems.

When we say "you" on this page, we assume that you have a CS account that you use for sending and receiving email.

Greylisting

Greylisting is an automatic process that prevents a lot of spam from even getting into our mail server in the first place. It doesn't need any configuration on your part and should work without any obvious effect on your mail. You may occasionally have emails whose delivery was delayed by greylisting, but that sort of thing should be fairly rare.

You can read more about our Greylisting implementation on our Greylisting page, and more about greylisting in general on Wikipedia's Greylisting page.

SpamAssassin

SpamAssassin analyzes email messages and gives them scores representing its estimation of how much they look like spam. SpamAssassin is only available to people who have their email delivered to the CS mailserver; if you have your email forwarded to another email address, you cannot use SpamAssassin.

By default, SpamAssassin will add "**SPAM**" to the subject lines of messages it believes to be spam, as well as adding an X-Spam-Flag: YES header. No other processing is done. In particular, no automatic filtering or deletion will take place.

If you want to customize how SpamAssassin works for you or do any sort of automatic filtering, please consult our SpamAssassin page for more information.

Antivirus

We run basic antivirus checks on any mail passing through our CS mail server (inbound and outbound). Messages matching known virus/malware signatures are automatically quarantined, but are not-user accessible.