The UVa Central Mail Service (CMS)
CMS Spam Tagging & Filtering FAQs
CMS Spam Tagging and Filtering Frequently-Asked Questions (FAQs)
If you have a question that this document does not address, please contact the UVa Help Desk.
- I have spam tagging enabled but am still seeing some spam messages in my Inbox. How do I stop all the spam messages?
- If I provide a copy of a spam message I received with its full headers, can you add it to the spam filters?
- Can you tell me how the spam filtering rules work?
- My messages (legitimate ones) are being tagged as spam! How can I stop this tagging from happening?
Answers to Frequently-Asked Questions
- I have spam tagging enabled but am still seeing some spam messages in my Inbox. How do I stop all the spam messages?
- How many spam messages you see will vary depending on your spam tolerance
setting. Information on changing this setting is available on the
CMS Spam page. It may be impossible to have a
spam tolerance setting that eliminates all spam while keeping all valid messages, but it
is our hope that the Central Mail Service (CMS) spam tagging/filtering service should
eliminate most spam while allowing valid messages to be delivered. Stopping all
spam messages is a desirable goal, but, given present tools, may not be possible. With the
present system, you can:
- filter most potential spam messages to the uva-potential-spam folder and see a few spam messages with your legitimate messages in your Inbox. In this scenario, you will need to delete the unwanted spam messages from your Inbox.
- filter all potential spam messages, and likely a few legitimate messages, to your uva-potential-spam folder. In this scenario, you will have to move the legitimate messages back to your Inbox from your uva-potential-spam folder.
- If I provide a copy of a spam message I received with its full headers, can you add it to the spam filters?
- We receive a defined set of criteria from the vendor and apply
them. When new criteria are distributed, we apply those. We use SpamAssassin for
our filtering rules. You can visit their website to see their
description of what they do and see the rules that they share.
We do not apply custom filters based on reports of spam received
by people in this community. In the future, we hope to be able
to offer that ability to you, but, at the present time, there
is not a way to do what you ask.
If you are receiving too many spam messages in your Inbox using a spam tolerance of 5, you may want to consider resetting your spam tolerance to 4 for a few days to see if that improves the situation for you. Information on changing this setting is available on the CMS Spam page. - Can you tell me how the spam filtering rules work?
- The spam checking rules, as a whole, are extremely complex.
There are hundreds of individual checks that are done on every
message received on the Central Mail Service (CMS). The names
of the ones that get triggered appear in the spam-tagging headers
that we put on each message. These headers can be seen by examining
the full headers for a particular message. It is important to
note that the names in the header can be misleading or non-intuitive.
We use filtering rules from SpamAssassin. You can visit their website to see their description of what they do and see the rules that they share. Understand that every test that is done is not documented by SpamAssassin or by us. - My messages (legitimate ones) are being tagged as spam! How can I stop this tagging from happening?
- If you have concerns about messages you send being tagged
as spam, you may want to:
- Test the rating of a message by sending it to yourself before you send the message to others. After you receive the message, you can look at the spam tagging headers to see how the message was evaluated.
- Keep messages short and simple and in plain text with few abnormal capitalizations.
Page Updated: 2011-06-28
