Spam Mail Filter
Contents
Personal spam folder
All the user's suspected spam is put in a personal mail file—/cs/spam/login (e.g. /cs/spam/george). Note that each message in this file will have an extra header, X-Spam-Reason, explaining why it was caught.
Users that have their mail automatically forwarded to mail.huji.ac.il (see mail.huji.ac.il accounts) will not have their mail spam-filtered before forwarding.
In order to view the folder from any CSE Linux machine, the user can do:
pine -if /cs/spam/login
E.g.
pine -if /cs/spam/george
Legitimate mail in spam folder
Sometimes the heuristic spam-catching algorithm errs and legitimate e-mail is caught in one's spam folder. In such a case, you should put the sender address of the legitimate e-mail in your ~/.nospam personal exception database described in the next section.
Personal exception database
Since legitimate e-mail can sometimes be caught in /cs/spam/login , the user can create a personal exception database ~/.nospam with a list of sender addresses to pass through to the user's main mail inbox without being put in /cs/spam/login —note that the sender address can be extracted from the Return-path: header of the message (visible in full header mode).
Example contents of ~/.nospam :
haim@eng.tau.ac.il *@wildnose.com *@*.huji.ac.il jody@* jay@natlib.com melody@math.gmu.edu
The above ~/.nospam file allows both individual addresses such as jay@natlib.com and groups of addresses such as all users from the wildnose.com domain and all users in subdomains of HUJI plus the login jody from any domain.
An entry of '*' (asterisk) will cause all suspected spam to pass through to your regular mailbox effectively disabling spam filtering.
Example:
echo '*' > ~george/.nospam
Spam folder cleanup
Any message left for more than 30 days in /cs/spam/login will be automatically deleted.
Hint: if you are going away for more than a month, it's a good idea to disable spam filtering (as explained above) during that time in order to avoid losing legitimate messages caught in the spam filter.
