IT @ NWU

What is a Spam Filter?

What is Spam?
Tagged Messages
Quick Guide to setup your Spam Filter
GroupWise Integration
Activate your Spam Filter here

Everyone has to agree that e-mail is one of the better ideas that mankind has conjured up in the past few hundred years. As a method of communication, it is fast, versatile, ubiquitous - because of its international reach, and above all, it is cheap when compared to other ways of communicating. It is these very attributes which also make it an attractive option for unscrupulous characters to abuse for their own personal (mostly commercial) gains.

This abuse manifests as Unsolicited Bulk E-mail, more commonly known as SPAM, whereby unscrupulous operators send countless e-mail messages, mostly of commercial nature, to as many recipients they can find, in the hope that at least some of them will show interest in whatever they have to offer.

Up to now, the only effective way you could deal with this problem was reactive - i.e. to wait for these messages to arrive in your Mailbox before you could do anything about it.

Enter the Spam Filter. The sole purpose of this system is to pro-actively identify Spam, and enable you as a user to set your own preferences as to how the mail system deals with these messages - before the message gets delivered to your Mailbox.

How it works

An advanced filter scans all your incoming messages, looking for spam "signatures". Each message gets assigned a score - the higher the score, the more likely the message is spam. You get to set a Threshold Score, and when an incoming message exceeds your Threshold Score, you can either:

1.	Have the filter Tag the message, so it is clearly distinguishable from your regular e-mail, and deliver it to your inbox, or
2.	Reject the message, and send a "Message Undeliverable" status report to the sender.

This service will not by default be automatically enabled on your mailbox. You have to do it yourself.

Please note

	Multiple Recipients The way we handle messages in our systems means that we have one chance to tag a message as being spam, even if it is addressed to multiple recipients. Doing it differently will likely bog the delivery of mail down to a mere trickle. This means that if you are one of the recipients, you can receive a message that was tagged as being spam - even if you don't have filtering enabled.
	Accuracy Not two people's notions of what constitutes "intolerable" spam and what not, will ever be the same. In terms of technology used to identify spam messages, we have chosen the absolute best that is available today. The accuracy returned by our solution to detect spam exceed 99% in real-life environments. (It is easy to get a 100% score in a lab, doing 99%+ in real deployments is no mean feat) This means that the system is likely to miss-classify about one in every hundred messages - it can either let a spam message through as non-spam, or it can incorrectly tag legitimate communication as spam. If you have your preferences set up to reject spam, your legitimate incoming message might be rejected as spam.
	Rejected messages can not be recovered. They are lost for good.

If you want to use this service, click here to set it up. Comprehensive, easy-to-follow instructions are included.

13 February 2012