Email at UVa: Dealing with Spam
Information on Anti-Spam Measures at UVa
UVa’s IronPort Anti-Spam Service
Spam is an ever-growing problem on the Internet. Most accounts at the University of Virginia receive spam messages. To mitigate the problem of having these messages delivered to Inboxes, UVa uses IronPort®, a Cisco® hardware applicance that runs IronPort® Anti-Spam™. The Anti-Spam™ service includes IronPort’s® Context Adaptive Scanning Engine (CASE) product.
These anti-spam services are:
- Provided automatically for faculty and staff with email accounts on the UVa Exchange Service and on the UVa Central Mail Service (CMS). These services are also automatic for messages to sent to a faculty or staff primary email address (for example, mst3k@virginia.edu).
- Also provided for students on UVa Gmail accounts, in addition to the excellent anti-spam services provided Google.
Those with accounts on departmental email systems will need to talk with their departmental system administrator for information about anti-spam measures on those systems.
Dealing with Spam
When a connection is made in an attempt to deliver a message to UVa, the IronPort® appliance checks the reputation of each message’s originating IP. Based on dynamic reputation filters, the appliance decides to either ignore the connection, refuse the connection, throttle the connection, or accept the message.
After a message has been accepted, it is then scanned for its similarity to spam and is given a classification. Once a message is delivered to your account, it is processed according to your email program’s way of working with spam messages. Typically, messages are classified as:
- Suspected spam - delivered to your “junk” mailbox;
- Not spam - delivered to your Inbox;
- Spam - discarded.
While our anti-spam system is good, it is not perfect. Sometimes a legitimate message will be put into your “junk” mailbox and sometimes a spam message will be delivered to your Inbox.
When you first begin to use email at UVa, we recommend that you review your “junk” mailbox daily until you are confident that the spam service is behaving as you need. Should you find a legitimate messages in your “junk” mailbox, you can move it to your Inbox for normal processing. If you find a spam message in your Inbox, please delete it.
After you are confident the service behaving as you need, you can check your “junk” mailbox anytime you believe you have missed a message to see if the message has been put into your “junk” mailbox.
