Implementing SpamAssassin

Click here to configure your Spam filter.

UTHSC Campus

Spamming is the practice of sending unsolicited, wasteful, and annoying e-mail messages to a single user or group(s) of users (e-mail lists).  Generally, most spam is commercial junk advertising; however, unwanted religious, racial, political, sexual or, even research-oriented messages are considered an act of spamming.

SpamAssassin evaluates and rates e-mail with respect to its likelihood of being spam and adds a header entry that can be used in the filter process at the client level. This will allow the user to configure his/her email client to evaluate this header and decide to divert the e-mail to another folder for visual evaluation or simply delete it. There are many issues when dealing with spam and visual inspection of e-mail by the user is the only way, most of the time, to be sure you are not eliminating or deleting legitimate e-mail.

What are Filters?

Mail filters allow you to selectively process incoming email. When you define a filter you specify how messages are to be selected and what is to be done with the selected messages. You may select messages based on:

• contents of the Subject, From, or To header lines
• spam score (likelihood of being spam)

The selected messages may then be:

• discarded, send to a folder marked for deletion whether or not you read them
• saved into a mail folder on your email account for you to review and delete if you do choose
• Messages not selected by any filter will be delivered to your INBOX as usual.

Note that filters are applied only to messages destined for your INBOX. If you have mail forwarding enabled, filters will not be applied to the forwarded messages.

Please click on instructions for information on how to configure the spam filters.

To configure the filter go to email management and login using your email userid and password. On the left side of the page select Email Filters which will bring you to the edit screen where you can select Edit Rules to allow you to configure the spam rules.