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ITS spam management - content scanning
The content scanning method described below is managed and supported by Yale Information Technology Services and applies to the majority of Yale students, faculty and staff who use email accounts
SpamAssassin is an ITS spam management tool. It scans the text of messages sent through the mail-servers to first.last@yale.edu addresses for patterns associated with spamming. Spam Assassin assigns scores based on the number of spam-like patterns it encounters in a single message. Messages where the score is 5 or above is tagged: “X-Yale-Tagged-Spam". Messages where the score is 5 or below is tagged: "X-Yale-Not-Spam"
Not all messages are scanned by SpamAssassin. Only email directed to your "first.last@yale.edu" address from off campus computers is funneled through the SpamAssassin server for spam detection. Email that is from on campus computers (yale.edu domain) is not scanned.
As a consequence of this, people who work off-campus and use a non-Yale Internet provider (ATT DSL, Cable network, etc. ) must use VPN or Yale server authenticated email to prevent their messages being funneled through SpamAssassin filters.
The medical campus uses SpamAssassin as well, but medical campus email users can further customize Spam Assassin filtering options using the medical campus email configuration tool.
How the headers are used
Messages that have more than 5 spam like patterns:
X-Yale-Tagged-Spam: For more info see: http://www.yale.edu/email/spam/content.html
X-Yale-Spam-Score: ******** (8.701)
X-Scanned-By: MIMEDefang 2.49 on 130.132.175.50
Messages that have fewer than 5 spam like patterns:
X-Yale-Not-Spam: For more info see: http://www.yale.edu/email/spam/content.html
X-Yale-Spam-Score: (0.178)
X-Scanned-By: MIMEDefang 2.51 on 130.132.50.51
These headers can be used for filtering spam away from the inbox to another folder, such as Tagged-Spam.. It's important to note that this an automatic process performed by mail robots. No humans read the contents of your email as a part of this process. No record is kept of the contents of messages. Scoring simply makes it easier to sort messages.
Increased freedom from unwanted messages comes at a price. Since now, all email that is scored spam goes into your tagged-spam folder (or another folder you identify), you must be responsible for looking at the stream of email diverted to your spam folder, so that you can identify false positives (if any). We expect the overall level of false positives to be low, and as these exceptions are reported to ITS, we will continue to tune SpamAssassin to make it smarter about the way Yale does business.
