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Manage Spam

Denison's email system uses software that automatically scans all email messages before they are delivered to the recipient to determine whether they are likely to be spam. This on-going process is continually changing as software is becoming able to identify spam more effectively.

How Denison's spam filters work

  1. Incoming mail is checked against several different Realtime Blackhole Lists, or lists of known spammers. Anything identified as coming from senders on this list is automatically rejected by our email system.
  2. MAPS, or software used to check validity of certain email elements, checks the email for proper standards called MIME types, including how email messages are formatted and the correctness of email attachments. If the email fails any of these checks the mail is rejected.
  3. If it passes the tests, the email enters our system where it is then checked by anti-virus and anti-spam software. If it fails either of these checks the mail gets moved to a quarantine area. Once in the quarantine area, users can view their rejected or quarantined email by using the Spamity software. On the rare chance that the anti-spam software has created a false-positive, or legitimate email marked as spam, users can use Spamity to move the email from the quarantined area to their inbox. This is called reinjecting mail. See the Spamity tutorial to learn how to reinject mail.
  4. In the final step, email is passed through sieve filters. The best way to get rid of unwanted spam that is still delivered to your account is to set up antispam filters and then filter lists. There are two types of lists which are set up by the users of each email account. Whitelists are lists of addresses to be ignored by anti-spam software, in other words safe-lists. Blacklists, or block lists, include addresses that aren't delivered to the inbox. You can set sieve filters by logging into Webmail and clicking the filters option. For further instructions on setting up your own filters see the Email Filter Instructions.

How to avoid spam