What is SPAM?

From Wikipedia:

Spamming is commonly defined as the sending of unsolicited bulk e-mail - that is, email that was not asked for (unsolicited) and received by multiple recipients (bulk). A further common definition of spam restricts it to unsolicited commercial e-mail, a definition that does not consider non-commercial solicitations such as political or religious pitches, even if unsolicited, as spam.

In the popular eye, the most common form of spam is that delivered in e-mail as a form of commercial advertising. However, over the short history of electronic media, people have spammed for many purposes other than the commercial, and in many media other than e-mail. Spammers have developed a variety of spamming techniques, which vary by media: e-mail spam, instant messaging spam, Usenet newsgroup spam, Web search engine spam, spam in blogs, and mobile phone messaging spam.

Spamming is economically viable because advertisers have effectively no operating costs beyond the management of their mailing lists. Because the barrier to entry is so low, the volume of unsolicited mail has produced other costs which are borne by the public (in terms of lost productivity and fraud) and by Internet service providers, which must add extra capacity to cope with the deluge. Spamming is widely reviled, and has been the subject of legislation in a number of jurisdictions.

General Information

Basic details

• This documentation applies to all Wittenberg email users.
• These functions are available through the WittLink portal.
• Messages meeting criteria as "spam" are no longer delivered by default to all email account users. Instead, by default spam messages are stopped at a quarantine email system unless you select a different option in the WittLink portal.
• These functions were requested by email users in various forms over time. The method of quarantine selected also engages the cost issue; hundreds of thousands of messages per week are received that meet the spam definitions in place. By preventing these messages from reaching all email users, disk space on email servers and backup tapes can be used for legitimate messages and those *selected* by our email users.

Quarantine Message Lifespan

• Messages older than 10 days are deleted by the system and cannot be recovered.

Mail Forwarding

• What impact does the SPAM quarantine have on mail forwarding?
• SPAM messages are filtered before email is forwarded. This means if you opt to quarantine spam email messages, the messages marked as SPAM will stay in your quarantined email at Wittenberg. Choosing quarantine combined with forwarding your email to another address means the "quarantine" (spam) will not be forwarded, while messages not marked as SPAM will be sent to your alternate email address as normal.

Spam Quarantine Portal link

Delivering Messages

• If you find a message in the quarantine system that you need to keep for more than 10 days, select the checkbox to the left of the message (or messages) and then click the "Deliver Checked" button. To deliver all of the messages in your quarantine to your regular email - click the "Deliver All" button.

Deleting Messages

To delete selected messages - select the checkbox to the left of the message (or messages) and then click the "Delete Selected" button.

To delete all spam quarantine messages - select the checkbox to the left of the message (or messages) and then click the selecting the Delete All or Delete Checked button.

Whitelist (Allow) Email Addresses or Domains

• If you find a message that you do not consider SPAM, add the sender's address to your personal white list by selecting the "Whitelist Checked" button. This will prevent future messages to you from that person from being marked as SPAM and means the messages pass through the system to your regular email. You also have the option to select the sender's domain address to a whitelist, allowing everything sent from any address at that domain to pass into your regular email. You can add up to 50 addresses to your personal white list. Wittenberg email addresses cannot be added to any of the whitelist functions. To view or remove "Whitelisted" rules, click the SPAM Delivery Options in the WittLink Portal.

Sorting Messages

• Clicking on one of the column headers - "Date", "To", "From", "Subject", or "Tags" - will sort the messages by that column.

Viewing a Message

• To view the details of any message, click any portion of that message in the list.

Spam Tag Explanation

• The "Tags" column below indicates why the message was stopped at the quarantine system.

• B - Blacklisted
• U - Url Blacklisted
• K - Keyword
• S - Statistical
• H - Illegal HTML coding

For a more information on the spam marking, please refer to this Documentation.

Spam delivery options link

• Select...for messages detected as SPAM: option
• Delete ALL SPAM - will delete ALL messages marked as spam by the system. Messages cannot be recovered if you select this option.
• Quarantine SPAM - will hold ALL messages marked as spam except those you either select for delivery or those that meet the "whitelist" rules you added through the Spam Quarantine portal page. This is the *default* option for everyone until you select a different option.
• Deliver SPAM, as if it were not checked by the SPAM filters at all. - will deliver literally all email messages. These messages will not have the spam marking in the subject line to allow easy filtering through an email program and will look just like all other messages you receive in your regular email account.

Select...for summary notices of quarantined messages: option

• Choose whether or not you'd like to receive a summary of the day's spam messages via email from the quarantine system. Information in the summary email includes To, From, and Subject of the messages from the last 24 hour period. The *default* option for everyone is to receive a summary until you select a different option.

Select...for messages incorrectly quarantined messages: option

• Selecting "Notify the Solutions Center of incorrectly quarantined messages" means messages you think were incorrectly stopped by the quarantine system are automatically sent to the Solution Center for examination. You do not need to forward a copy of the email to abuse@wittenberg.edu if you select this option. "Notify" is the *default* option for everyone until you select a different option.

Remove a whitelist entry from your rules, or view your entries

• To remove a "Whitelist" rule from your rule(s), selecte the rule(s) you wish to remove by placing a check mark next to the rule you wish to remove and click the "Save Changes" button.

For messages you receive that *should* be stopped by the quarantine system as spam:

• Forward the email message to abuse@wittenberg.edu and let us know there's a problem. We'll let you know if the messages can be stopped at the system level after looking into the message information.

More information about spam and prevention:

• http://www4.wittenberg.edu/administration/cctr/e-mail/index.html

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This document last reviewed June 26, 2006.