Teach you email about SPAM

By John Guidone, Ricardo Chavira, and Richard Walser



In July 2002, Walter Mossberg wrote in the Wall Street Journal that “Spam is the scourge of the Internet, and it may yet kill e-mail as a valuable communications medium.” Well, that was almost 5 years ago, and the number of SPAM messages circulating the globe has steadily increased, to the point where between 75% and 90% of all email is unsolicited. This is a world-wide problem that is affecting virtually every Internet Service Provider (ISP), not just Yale, and that continues to challenge IT professionals to find creative solutions for dealing with this problem. Spam management is most effective when ITS and our clients work together to address this issue.


SPAM management is a three tier process that requires the use of: 1. Automated server side filtering; 2. Tailored server-side filtering through use of the University Spam Management tools, SPAM Assassin for Medical School accounts or the Email Management Tool for central campus accounts; and 3. teaching your email client (eg. Eudora, Thunderbird) to recognize junk mail through the use of ‘Junk Filters.’ Currently, Yale servers filter about 21.5 million messages per month, or about 53% of all mail hitting Yale’s email servers. This is accomplished through the use of the first 2 layers just mentioned. Yale servers identify and block messages known to be ‘bad’ in layer 1. In layer 2, messages are ‘scored’ based on a set of predefined criteria and marked as *****SPAM***** by the servers. These ‘marked’ messages can be either delivered to your inbox, or moved to a ‘Tagged Spam” mailbox, depending on how you have your Spam Management tools configured. The Medical campus’ Spam Assassin can be configured at this address https://webmail.med.yale.edu/spam/login.php. The Central campus’ Email Account Management Tool is configured here: https://config.mail.yale.edu/account-tool/do-login. If you need assistance configuring either of these systems, please call the service desk at 2-900, or 5-3200 for help.


The final piece of the Spam Management puzzle requires you, as an email consumer, to take certain steps to minimize the likelihood that SPAM mail will reach your inbox. Here are several things that you can do:



Also, learn to use the built-in Junk mail filtering systems on your email client. These Junk Mail Filters are designed to ‘learn’ which messages you consider to be ‘Junk’, and will handle those messages based on criteria that you set-up. Some of these features include: