YITP SPAM FAQ

  • What's the SPAM filtering policy for incoming YITP email messages?

    We use spamassassin for identifying SPAM, but we do not do system-wide filtering. It's up to each user to filter out the identified SPAM messages using his/her own email client.

  • How are SPAM messages identified?

    spamassassin marks each message it considers SPAM by adding "[SPAM]" in the subject of the message, but please be aware that spamassassin isn't 100% accurate, so legit messages may be identified as spam from time to time, which means that you'll lose those messages if you simply junk all messages marked as "[SPAM]". We suggest to save all marked SPAM messages in a mail folder, which should be inspected for non-SPAM and then emptied on a regular basis.

  • What if I received a SPAM message that's not identified by spamassassin as such?

    You can report the SPAM message manually by saving the message (on max2) and using the command 

    spamassassin -r < messagefilename

    it's also possible to pipe the message to spamassassin in pine (on max2) by selecting the message and using the pipe (|) command and then enter the command "spamassassin -r"

  • What if spamassassin identified a non-spam message as SPAM?

    You can report a HAM (non-SPAM) message identified as SPAM by saving the message (on max2) and using the command 

    spamassassin -k < messagefilename

    it's also possible to pipe the message to spamassassin in pine (on max2) by selecting the message and using the pipe (|) command and then enter the command "spamassassin -k"

  • Is it possible to report a whole (unix) mail folder file (in mbox format) as SPAM?

    Yes, use the command (on max2) 

    spamassassin -r --mbox < messagemboxname

    where messagemboxname should be in unix mbox format (e.g. mail folders created by pine).

  • How to filter out SPAM in pine?

    menu (m) -> setup (s) -> rules (r) -> filters (f)

    [more info]

  • How to filter out SPAM using procmail?

    add this recipe (e.g.) to your procmailrc file (on max2): 

    :0 :
* ^Subject:.*\[SPAM\]
SPAM

    Note: using procmail as filter can be dangerous because procmail recipes aren't intuitive and slight mistakes could mean losing mail messages. So it's recommened that the internal filters in mail clients be used instead.

  • Why did some incoming messages sent to my @stonybrook.edu or @sunysb.edu address bounce?

    There seems to be a campus-wide email filter for filtering incoming email messages sent to any official @stonybrook.edu or @sunysb.edu email addresses, so if some of your incoming messages to those addresses bounced, the campus-wide mail filter is the likely culprit. This is a rather bad policy because the campus-wide mail filter quite often identifies non-SPAM messages as SPAM. If you don't like it, we suggest you should send them a complaint:

    telnet@notes.cc.stonybrook.edu
    support@noc.stonybrook.edu

  • Are outgoing messages filtered?

    All outgoing messages from campus are scanned and filtered by some virus scanning software. It's not clear whether the software also scans for SPAM.

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