Antispam Tool
Campus-wide
The Network Systems Group of MINS has tested an antispam product, SPAM ASSASSIN, on the email servers and feels it is now safe to recommend the use of this tool to those Barnard email users who are experiencing issues with spam.
The antispam product will attempt to determine if incoming mail is spam by header and text analysis. If the email is determined to be spam, the email is tagged with the word SPAM in the subject line and then gets delivered to your inbox. The subject line will be something like this:
Subject: *****SPAM*****
You can then enable filters/rules for your local email client (Eudora, Outlook, Netscape, etc.) to move mail that has been tagged as *****SPAM**** to a folder of your choice. The antispam product does NOT automatically delete any email tagged as spam. It is up to you to decide what you want to do with that email. Current statistics list the false positive rate at about 1%.
The antispam feature is activated on a per user basis. If you are interested in activating this feature, follow these steps:
-
Telnet to bc.barnard.edu (staff) or eclipse.barnard.edu (students)
-
At the $ prompt, type "antispam on" (without the quotes). If you want to turn off the spam tagging at a later date, just type "antispam off" (without the quotes).
It is possible to configure SPAM ASSASSIN to
-
ignore (whitelist) emails from specific senders
-
tag as spam (blacklist) emails from specific senders.
The following instructions are for advanced users who have previous experience in editing UNIX files.
In order to whitelist or blacklist false
positives or false negatives, you need to edit a config file in your home
directory after turning on the antispam feature.
- ssh/telnet bc.barnard.edu (faculty & staff)
or eclipse.barnard.edu (students)
- Type pico ~/.spamassassin/user_prefs at the $ prompt.
(This opens your user preferences file.)
- Go to the end of that file (arrow down; Control-V for
next page).
- After the very last line of text in that file, i.e.
underneath the last line beginning with a #, type in “whitelist_from [the
complete email address of the sender you want to remove from Spam]” or
“blacklist_from [the complete email address of the sender you want to
designate as Spam].” (Do not
use the quotations marks.)
- Enter Control-X to exit from the
file.
- When asked “Do you want to save the changes …” type Y and Enter.