Physics & Astronomy

Spam Filtering Information

At the beginning of 2005, the CSR office began to filter incoming messages for spam. There are several tools we are using to combat spam. One these is actually a suite of tools called MailScanner. This program uses other tools like SpamAssassin to give each message a spam score. Once all checks have been done, the score is compared against a threshold to determine what type of message it is. We have three classifications for these messages

• High Spam
• Low Spam
• Ham

High Spam are messages that have a very high spam score. The system discards these messages and they never reach an Inbox.

Low Spam are messages that have scored such that they are most likely spam, but it is still possible that the message could still be legitimate. These messages are sent on to the Inbox, but with the original message as an attachment.

Ham are messages that are believed to be legitimate email messages and delivered to the Inbox without modification

Below is a graph showing the different amounts of High Spam, Low Spam and Ham that the department has received over the last 60 days.