UF CNS Now Provides Junk E-mail Filtering for ufl.edu Accounts

Tim Fitzpatrick, Director, Computing and Networking Services

UF Computing & Networking Services (CNS) is pleased to announce new junk-mail filtering capability for your UF e- mail accounts. Using these filters, you can save time, and annoyance by eliminating most “spam” before you even see it!

CNS’s Open Systems Group has enabled a “spam-detection” system for e-mail sent to GatorLink userid@ufl.edu addresses. This process gives each message a score, using asterisks (*) to “grade” each message. If a message gets a score of 5 (*****) or more asterisks, we’re pretty certain it’s spam. Because these spam scores are now a part of the headers in your e-mail, they can be used as a sorting/screening device in many e-mail clients. This will allow your program to screen out junk e-mail so you don’t have to see it.

Will this happen automatically? Before you see any benefit, you will have to set up filters in your e-mail program to read the “spam scores” and take whatever action you decide (such as moving the messages to a separate folder to review/delete later).

Each mail client is different. CNS has developed how-to documents to help you configure some of the more common clients, including: Eudora, Netscape/Mozilla/Thunderbird, Microsoft Outlook, and Pine.

In conjunction with this, CNS has also enhanced GatorLink WebMail (http://webmail.ufl.edu) to include support for spam filtering.

For more information, please see http://www.cns.ufl.edu/spam.