How to Set Spam Filters

Spam filters can be applied to the following brands of e-mail readers at the University of Richmond:

• Outlook XP/2003 Mail
• Outlook 2000 Mail
• Spider Mail
• Entourage
• Apple Mail

Directions for other e-mail readers can be found at the Spam Assassin Web site. When e-mails are received at the University of Richmond, they are processed by a software package called Spam Assassin that assigns a spam score to each message. If there is a very high likelihood that an e-mail message contains spam, the mail header will contain a large number of s's. For example, the following score indicates that there is a high likelihood that the message is spam:

    X-Spam-Level: ssssssssssssssssssss

If there is a very low likelihood that an e-mail message contains spam, the mail header will contain few if any s's. For example:

    X-Spam-Level: ss

The links above provide instructions to filter messages with a spam score of five s's:

    X-Spam-Level: sssss

which will filter most spam messages without filtering too many legitimate messages.

If you feel that too many spam messages are getting through to your inbox, remove s's from the filter. If you feel that too many legitimate messages are being scored as spam, add s's to the filter.

You can direct spam messages to a special mail folder (we suggest creating a special folder for this purpose, called 'SPAM'). By redirecting the potential spam messages to folders other than your inbox, you can review them or delete them at your leisure, saving you the time of sorting the 'good' e-mail from the 'bad.'