Unsolicited, unwelcome, and sometimes offensive commercial email — “spam” — continues to plague the world’s electronic mail users. Here at UCI, NACS began regularly filtering inbound electronic mail nearly two years ago in an effort to catch and label spam, rendering it easily identifiable by end users. NACS runs the SpamAssassin software on the campus electronic mail gateways (also known as Mail Transfer Agents, or MTAs), as well as on the Enterprise Services servers often referred to as “ea” and “e4e”.
SpamAssassin uses a variety of techniques to determine if a message is spam, and if it is, the software adds “headers” to the message labeling it as such. Most electronic mail programs, such as Eudora, Outlook, and Netscape, are capable of reading and processing these special headers. You must configure your mail software to take advantage of this feature.
NACS remains dedicated to reducing the amount of spam received by our users, and we continue to research new ideas and techniques for doing so.
If you are uncertain as to whether or not your electronic mail program can be configured to make use of the SpamAssassin headers, contact your local computing support coordinator or the NACS Response Center.
More information about the NACS spam tagging service can be found on the web at http://www.nacs.uci.edu/email/spam/index.html, including how to configure Eudora, Netscape, Outlook XP, Mail for MacOS X, Microsoft Entourage X, and Procmail to filter-out spam which has been identified the the service.