Some information about SPAM (Unsolicited eMail)
Posted by Administrator (admin) on Jan 19 2007 at 12:26 PM
News >> FYI

The amount of SPAM that we are receiving at the Institute has been growing
exponentially.  There is now much more SPAM than legitimate email.

To help with this problem, we have started removing email that have a high
likelihood of being SPAM.  This may remove some legitimate email, but given the
volume of email, it is necessary.

All email entering the School of Mathematics is scanned by SpamAssassin, a spam
filtering program.  SpamAssassin assigns a score to email, a higher score means
the email is more likely to be spam than a lower score would.  We have started
filtering out email which scores higher than 10.

Email which scores higher than 4.5 (and lower than 10) is moved to a folder
called junk-email.  In your home directory, this is located in Mail/junk-email
(e.g. /home/member/bob/Mail/junk-email).

If you wish to whitelist an email address, to ensure you always receive email
from this address, regardless of score, add them to your whitelist.  In your
home directory, there is a file called user_prefs located in .spamassassin.  If
you always wish to receive email from jane@goodguys.com, add the following to
this file:
whitelist_from	jane@goodguys.com

This information is available in our FAQ,
http://www.math.ias.edu/pages/services/computing/faq-detail.php?faq=12