Unsolicited commercial email, commonly known as spam, has been a frustrating, and growing, problem for most everyone who uses electronic mail.  Academic Computing & Networking (AC&N) has received many complaints and expressions of concern about the volume and content of these unsolicited messages during recent months.  In response to these concerns, AC&N has sought input and evaluated options to provide better spam management options for our email users.  We concluded that the solution must

• be accessible to any email user,
• work with multiple email clients and web browsers, and
• provide a straightforward and simple interface.

A spam identification and filtering system will be implemented in up to three phases beginning on Wednesday, March 3.

• Phase 1  - Spam Identification (approx 2 weeks).  All email sent to user@mines.edu addresses from outside the campus, and some email from inside the campus, will first pass through a system that will analyze messages.  This will occur for anyone who receives messages addressed to an email address of the form user@mines.edu even if your email is forwarded to another system (such as is.mines.edu) or domain (such as hotmail.com).  Email messages sent to addresses of the form user@somethingelse.mines.edu will not be affected unless your system administrator works with us to establish the service.  Information Services is planning to implement this service for is.mines.edu addresses in the near future. If a message is suspected to be spam, the subject line will be modified, based on the probability the email is spam, to begin with one of two bracketed headers ([spam-medium] or [spam-high]).  Details on how to use this information to sort or separate messages into different mailboxes with various email clients will be available on the AC&N website within the next few days at the follwoing web address: http://www.mines.edu/academic/computer/email/spam/
  
  
• Phase 2 – Filtering/Quarantine options.  After the first 2 or 3 weeks, email users will be provided an option to establish a ”quarantine” inbox on the spam filter system.  This will allow you to prevent the automatic delivery of mail tagged as [spam-high] and give you a way to quickly review and determine the disposition of such mail.  You will also be able to direct the spam filter system to always allow or disallow messages (commonly called whitelist/blacklist) from specific addresses or domains, activate notification messages and set other preferences.  If you have established a quarantine inbox, quarantined messages will be deleted automatically within 30 days if you do nothing to manage the messages.
  
  
• Phase 3 – System-wide blocking or rejection of known spam sites.  Although this service will be used carefully since it must be implemented on a site-wide basis, it is important to implement for several reasons.  The use  of this service will depend upon system performance and other circumstances, however.  When enabled, it will be used to protect the campus from known spam sites and to prevent mines.edu from being blacklisted due to excessive attempts to send email to bad addresses.  Messages detected to come from sites or systems identified by one or more blacklisting services as “known spam servers or sites” may or will be blocked or rejected without notification.  Our tests so far indicate this feature to be accurate.

• this new service should not impact filtering you may already be doing with spamassassin, an email client, or other spam services you may be using, though you may find that subject lines are altered with our spam tags.
• during phase 1, all email received will continue to be delivered to your inbox and during phase 2 you can control whether email is delivered or quarantined.
• our desire is to provide a positive solution that helps you to deal effectively with the growing problem of unwanted spam email (we're fed up with it too), so please open a ticket at helpdesk.mines.edu if you have any questions or comments.

Derek Wilson
Director, Academic Computing & Networking