spam

Tips and Tricks: Managing Spam

August 16, 2016 by Lyle Wiedeman

Your email account is set up to help you perform your job. But there are thousands of individuals who want to use your account to sell you something, or steal something from you. Unsolicited commercial email – or spam – wastes your time and other University resources and exposes you to malicious software.

What does OIT do to protect me?

OIT blocks known spammers from sending email to UCI. If someone has been improperly listed, the message our spam blocker sends will alert the sender to the problem and give an opportunity to fix it.

What can I do to limit spam?

OIT examines incoming email and tags it if it looks like spam. To take advantage of these tags, you must set up spam filters (see “What can I do about spam?” on OIT’s spam web page) to move messages marked as spam from your Inbox to a spam folder. No automated technique can determine with 100% accuracy if a message is spam. Check your spam folder periodically for legitimate messages that were incorrectly marked as spam, as well as to delete the actual spam.

If you use Office365 as your mail service, the Exchange server analyzes incoming mail, directing messages that are very likely spam to your Junk Mail folder. A secondary feature which you can activate is “clutter.” Exchange tries to learn the messages that are not important to you and directs them to your Clutter folder. By moving messages to the Clutter folder, or rescuing messages from the Clutter folder, you can train Exchange how to perform this gentler, second-level filtering. For more on Clutter, read this Office Online article from Microsoft.

How can I help?

You can help us identify new sources and styles of spam. We have a special email address for reporting such behavior, and detailed instructions can be found in the OIT Knowledge Base.

Spam Tagging – Your Friend in a World of Spam

April 24, 2009 by Brian Roode

NACS employs many techniques to maximize the quality of the campus email system, and in particular to limit the amount of junk email (spam) faculty and staff receive. Known spam senders are automatically blocked, for example, and campus mail gateways require adherence to email standards (which spammers often ignore) before email is accepted for delivery.

Beyond that, email delivery is a balancing act between reliability and convenience on the one side, and security on the other. It is annoying to receive junk email, but it is unacceptable to block a message which was wanted.

One feature of the campus email service that helps achieve this balance is the mail-scanning service which rates every incoming message for the likelihood that it is junk mail. This assessment is recorded in special “header” lines in the delivered email of the form “X-UCIRVINE”.

Sometimes a message comes from a dubious source. Those messages get a header line “X-UCIRVINE-MailScanner-From:” Other times the content of the message matches patterns associated with spam. These messages will get a line “X-UCIRVINE-SpamScore:” with a number of copies of the letter ‘s’ proportional to the number of suspicious elements in the messages.

These lines are not normally displayed by email readers, but users can configure the programs to look for these lines and file away such messages in a spam folder for later assessment at their convenience. For users of NACS’s Enterprise Services email, this spam filter is easily activated with “My Email Options.”

Only messages coming to UCI from off campus are subject to this analysis. Intracampus email is delivered directly.

NACS tunes the rules that characterize email regularly, incorporating each new trick developed by spam senders into the mail scanner.

Faculty and staff working from home (sending email from off campus) should consider using Webmail, the VPN, or configuring their email software to use the authenticated campus mail gateway (smtp.uci.edu) to avoid the possibility that your email might be scanned, flagged, and isolated.

Most Spam is Blocked

March 26, 2009 by John Mangrich

In 2008, UCI email readers were spared almost one billion spam messages which were blocked by the NACS spam-mitigation system prior to delivery. This represents more than 21,000 messages for each faculty, staff, and student at UCI last year.

Of the messages accepted for delivery, 12 million were labeled as potentially spam so that people could quarantine them and inspect them at their convenience. Here is a summary of the spam and mail delivery statistics for 2008:

Total Messages Blocked: 869,295,065
Total Messages Accepted: 97,484,167
Total Messages Accepted marked as spam: 11,786,134

The chart shows the number of spam messagess blocked each day in 2008 (in red) and the number of messages accepted for delivery (in blue.) You can find more information on spam and spam filtering on line.

Higher Performance Email Service

October 5, 2008 by John Mangrich

During the last academic year, NACS made a number of enhancements to the central campus email service.

The most important changes were implemented to improve performance and responsiveness of the email system, including the Webmail interface.

One of those changes was the format in which email was stored (the “mix mailbox format” from the University of Washington) which allows much faster response with large inboxes. The email servers are connected to disk storage in a new way, improving access speeds. We’ve also installed new versions of the email server software (the program that supports POP and IMAP), which includes features that improve server performance.

Other enhancements include:

Disk quotas have been expanded to 1Gb for faculty and 500Mb for staff, and larger quotas are on the horizon.

The maximum size of an email message has been expanded from 20 million to 30 million bytes. Practically, this means you can send larger attachments in a message. However, large attachments affect email server performance, and may not be acceptable at the destination server. Therefore, it is prudent to be aware of your attachment size, and you should consider alternatives for file sharing such as sending a link to your document.

In addition to these visible changes, NACS maintains email performance in other ways, such as applying security patches, and refining the rules that identify spam.

Protecting UCI from Spam

May 14, 2004 by Dana Roode

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.