What is Spam?

Spam is the abuse of electronic messaging systems to indiscriminately send unsolicited bulk messages. While the most widely recognized form of spam is email spam, the term can also be applied to other forms or mediums. This information bulletin covers email spam only.

Tagged Message Header Format

SpamAssassin software will evaluate email messages at the campus border. If an email message is determined to be spam, a tag is added to the email header. A new email header was created for Outlook users to allow for a more granular evaluation via an Outlook rule, using the newly created (January 09) ‘X-UCD-MS-Spam-Score:’ tag in the header.

SpamAssassin tagging adds a notation in the message header using the following formats:

X-UCD-Spam-Score: (a value from 1 to 40), ie X-UCD-Spam-Score: 6.3 (******)

and

X-UCD-MS-Spam-Score: a series of astericks,ie X-UCD-MS-Spam-Score: ****

By default, any email messages tagged with as spam and having a ‘X-Spam-Score’ of 15 or higher is dropped at the campus border and you would never this SPAM score in the message headers. Typically, a score of 5 or higher is considered to be spam, and messages receiving a score of 4 or lower are more likely to be legitimate email messages.

Click here for more information on Campus SPAM Filtering Basics.

Rules in Outlook 2007 for Spam Filtering within Xeda

For the Xeda Exchange users, filtering spam tagged by the campus SpamAssassin software requires an Outlook rule (other email clients may refer to rules as “filters”). This rule can then move all messages tagged as spam to the users ‘Junk E-mail’ folder.

The procedure to create a spam rule in Outlook 2007 is described below:

1) You should remove any existing spam filtering rules.

2) With Outlook 2007 open, in the menu field click Tools, and then click Rules and Alerts…

3) In the ‘E-mail Rules’ tab, create a new rule by clicking the ‘New Rule’ option:

4) Select “Start from a blank rule” and then “Check messages when they arrive”. Click Next

5) Select “with specific words in the message header” and then click the specific words (underlined link) in the bottom window labeled

6) Type X-UCD-MS-Spam-Score: **** (exactly) then click Add, then click OK. Note: This will filter messages with 4 asterisks or higher. If you prefer, you can use any number of asterisks, ie X-UCD-MS-Spam-Score: ***, which will filter messages containing at least 3 asterisks or higher. For our example, we will use 4 asterisks or higher filtering.

7) Click Next. In the bottom window labeled “Step 2: Edit this rule description (click an underlined value), click the word specified in the sentence “move it to the specified folder”. Find the folder “Junk E-mail” and click OK. Scroll down and also check “stop processing more rules” (recommended).

8) Click Finish. Then click OK, verify first that the new rule is enabled with a check next to it.

End