Unwanted Email

Unsolicited commercial email, or "spam", is one of the biggest problems on the Internet today.  It is estimated that more than 60% of the messages on the Internet are spam and that this percentage is increasing at the rate of 2% per month. 

While almost all spam is annoying, much of it is actually offensive.  The IS&T Department  is working hard to  protect the Chapman community from unwanted email but we need your cooperation to make our measures effective for you.

• Our first line of defense is our SpamAssassin spam filter.  SpamAssassin gives a "spam score" to each message received by the Chapman servers and tags messages whose score is abave a threshold with the string *****SPAM***** in the subject.  You should delete messages tagged as *****SPAM***** without reading them unless you have a good reason to believe the message is legitimate.
  
  If you receive a legitimate message that has been tagged as spam you can add the senders of these messages to your "whitelist" so that future messages from these addresses will not be tagged.
  
  Likewise if you receive a message that you consider to be spam but which is not tagged, you can add the senders of these messages to your "blacklist" so that future messages from these addresses will be tagged.
  
  To manage your "whitelist" and "blacklist", login to http://webmail.chapman.edu, choose Options from the main menu and then choose SpamAssassin Configuration.
  
  
• Our next line of defense is our Exchange SErver SPAM filter.  If you are using our Exchange server (most faculty and almost all staff are using the Exchange server and we are working to move all faculty and staff to the Exchange server) then messages tagged as *****SPAM***** will be automatically moved to a SPAM folder.  Messages quarantined in your SPAM folder will be automatically removed after two weeks. 
  
  
• The third line of defense is the new Junk E-Mail filter in Outlook 2003.  This filter is a great complement to SpamAssassin and can catch many varieties of spam that are are missed by SpamAssassin.  You can configure several options of the Junk E-Mail filter and can even configure it so that you will only accept messages from addresses in a "Safe Senders List" that you can define.
  
  
• The fourth line of defense is another feature of Outlook which can be configured to not display images in messages that you receive unless you explicitly request those images to be displayed.  This not only gives you protection from offensive images but also protect you from potentially dangerous images that load from other servers and that can be used to compromise your privacy.

For the greatest level of protection from unwanted e-mail you should be using Outlook with the Junk E-Mail filter set to "High" or "Safe Senders Only" and the "Automatic Picture Download" Security setting set to its default value.