Spam Filtering For IMAP Users

How Can I Better Manage Spam?

To help users manage unsolicited email (spam), the CSL now offers a SpamAssassin-based mail checking system. This system is for users whose mail is delivered to the IMAP server. To check if your mail is being delivered to the IMAP server:

1. Go to the CSL Authenticated Web Server at http://www-auth.cs.wisc.edu.
2. Click Continue to Web Forms.
3. Enter your regular CS username and password to log in.
4. Under the Your Account heading, click Check or change your e-mail delivery server.

Note: If your mail is not currently delivered to the IMAP server, you can use the same form to change your mail delivery to IMAP. Before doing so, please read the "IMAP Mail Server" information in the Computer Systems Lab Documentation.

This system is provided on an "opt-in" basis for existing accounts. New accounts, however, have spam delivered to a 'caughtspam' folder.

Note: No spam detection system is perfect. Even with a high accuracy rate, it will overlook some spam, and inadvertently mark some "genuine" mail as spam.

For this reason, messages marked as spam are not automatically deleted. Instead, suspected spam is marked and either put in your inbox or moved into a 'caughtspam' mail folder.

Either way you can still retrieve an email you were expecting to get but that might have been inadvertently marked as spam. If a particular set of mail is consistantly mismarked as spam (or not marked as spam), you can add it to a whitelist or blacklist using a Spam Filtering Preferences web form (see below for details).

Enabling Spam Checking For IMAP Users

1. Log into the CSL Authenticated Web Server at http://www-auth.cs.wisc.edu.
2. Click Continue to Web Forms.
3. Enter your regular CS username and password to log in.
4. Under the heading Your Account, select Email management tool.
5. In the "Spam checking mode" section, select to either:
   1. Mark spam and deliver to your inbox, OR
   2. Mark spam and deliver to a "caughtspam" folder, then Click on the Submit button.
6. After enabling spam checking, you can set some individual preferences on the Spam Filtering Preferences page. You don't need to have custom settings - you can just use the default settings if you prefer.
7. Select the Go to the spam filtering preferences form link on the Email Management Tool page (or just click on Spam filtering preferences CSL Forms Your Account section). This includes items such as whitelisting, blacklisting, etc.

Caught Spam Management

For space consideration on the IMAP server, 'caughtspam' that is older than 21 days is deleted. This gives you approximately 3 weeks to look through old mail for false positives in your caughtspam folders.