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.