For those of you tired of spending 1/3 of your time with your e-mail deleting unwelcome advertising and other invitations, there is a new feature of the campus e-mail service which will help.
NACS has recently deployed SpamAssassin on the campus mail routers, which scans all incoming mail for telltale signs that a message may be spam. Based on its calculations, it will insert “header” information into the message which will provide a strong hint as to the nature of the e-mail message. (A header is a non-message part of an e-mail, such as the source of the e-mail, the time it was sent, the subject, and certain information about the kind of content in the “body” of the e-mail.)
These extra header lines can be seen by most e-mail readers, and you can configure your favorite application to automatically file or delete messages which meet certain kinds of criteria. Don’t want to be invited to XXX web sites? Teach your application to toss them out! Don’t want electronic junk-mail (“buy! buy!”)? Toss it out!
Information on how to configure various popular e-mail readers in use at UCI can be found at http://www.nacs.uci.edu/email/spam-assassin.html