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E-mail Spam Policy

Version: 1.0
Created: 2004 January 26

All Case faculty, staff and students who have email account privileges will automatically be provisioned on the appliance for spam detection. By default all user accounts on the appliance will be disabled. See the Opting-in to the Spam Filtering Process below.

Checking for Spam

All incoming and outgoing mail using the University mail system will be checked for spam. This includes local mail where both the sender and recipient are on campus, all incoming mail originating from off-campus and all outgoing mail destined for off-campus recipients. The mail scanner evaluates incoming messages and employs several tests to determine if it is potentially spam. In the disabled mode all messages classified as spam have an additional "X-Junkmail" header added. The value of the "X-Junkmail" header will be UCE(<score>) where UCE stands for Unsolicited Commercial Email and <score> is the point score assigned to the message during the spam checking process. This action cannot be disabled.

Disposition of Spam

All messages will be delivered to the end-user. The appliance will never discard a message identified as spam. The disposition of mail identified as spam is the responsibility of the end-user.

Blacklists and Whitelists

The spam appliance has rules to block what it considers spam but allows each user to configure their own settings. A whitelist is a list of email addresses or domain names from which the spam appliance allows messages to be received, even if it was originally classified by the system as spam. A blacklist is a list of email addresses or domain names used to filter out undesirable messages, whether the system has classified them as spam or not. In the disabled mode, incoming messages are not checked against the user's white or black lists.

Opting-in to the Spam Filtering Process

All eligible users will have an account on the spam filtering appliance, initially with the Junk-mail filter disabled. To use white and black lists each user will have to enable the Junk-mail filter by logging onto the spam appliance at: http://spamcontrol.case.edu/. Selecting "Enable Junk-mail filtering" will activate white and black lists and modify the "To" field for every message identified as spam. The "To" field will be modified to <user>+JunkMail@case.edu.

Mail Filtering - Disabled Mode (default)

• All mail is evaluated for spam.
• Personal blacklists and whitelists are NOT active.
• The "X-Junkmail" header is added to all mail identified as spam.

Mail Filtering - Enabled Mode

• All mail is evaluated for spam.
• Personal black-lists and white-lists are active.
• The "X-Junkmail" header is added to all mail identified as spam.
• "To" field is modified to <user>+JunkMail@case.edu

End-user Responsibilities

• Opting-in to the spam filtering process.
• Maintaining personal whitelists and blacklists. These lists are only considered in the spam filtering process after the user has elected to opt-in.
• The final disposition of unwanted mail is the responsibility of the end-user. This includes reviewing all mail identified as spam and deciding how it should be handled. Possible actions include redirecting messages into separate folder or automatically deleting messages, although this action is not recommended as messages that are automatically deleted may be irretrievably lost. Each end-user is responsible for configuring their mail client with the chosen action.

  Step-by-step instructions for configuring common clients will be made available by the ITS Help Desk.

This policy may be changed at any time, as needed.