Avoiding annoying email
Date: 10/29/2004
Recently ITSS has heard an increasing number of complaints about annoying email, most commonly known as spam. In response to these complaints, we will increase the screening threshold on one of our two spam-filtering services on Monday, November 1, at 5 PM.
Please be aware that this will also increase the number of legitimate messages that get tagged as spam. Please review your tagged email to be sure that you don't miss something important.
Here are some tips to decrease the number of spam messages you get in your inbox daily:
- If you are not yet using our SpamAssassin filter, you must activate it for your account. See Spam - What it is and how to fight it for information about how to sign up.
- Our second spam filter, Symantec Anti-Virus or SAV, marks spam as [SPAM-SAV] in the subject line of the message. You can use an ITSS mail filter to eliminate these messages from your inbox by having the filter search for [SPAM-SAV] in the subject line. See: Spam - What it is and how to fight it for more information.
- We are seeing many spam messages with addresses of the form user@bulldog.d.umn.edu or user@ub.d.umn.edu. If you are getting spam addressed like this, use an ITSS mail filter to search for bulldog.d.umn.edu and/or ub.d.umn.edu in the "to" line.
Here are some tips to avoid having your legitimate email tagged as spam:
- Avoid using words or phrases written in all capital letters.
- Avoid using multiple dollar signs all in a row.
- Limit the number of urls you include in your message. Messages with many urls are often tagged as spam.
- Avoid certain key words or phrases common in spam, such as "free" or "register now," especially in the subject line.
- If you are sending an email to a large list of names, send a draft to yourself first to make sure it passes the spam filters.
Even though some spam is still making it to your mailboxes, we really are filtering out a great deal of spam. On a typical day we reject 69,000 messages that never even make to the tagging and delivery stage.
10.29.04 sb