spam management SCENARIOS
The information provided below is designed to help you manage the flow of unwanted mail (spam) into your Inbox. Each person with an @bu.edu account can control his or her own spam blockingsettings, and this page gives some examples of how to adjust those settings to meet your goals for managing spam.
What are my options?
- Step 1: Blocked mail will never get to you -- you will never see it. Blocking is set by default at 7.5. You can adjust your blocking threshold to meet your spam blocking goals.
- Step 2: Some of your unwanted mail will not be blocked but it will have a "tag" in the message headers that you can use to direct it to a folder (such as "Trash," "Spam" or "Junk") if you choose to. What this tag does is indicate that SpamAssassin thinks the message is suspicious. This tagging system allows you to check mail that falls in the buffer area between legitimate and spam -- to make sure nothing you wanted gets deleted by accident. To filter tagged messages, follow our related instructions.
- Step 3: Filter unwanted mail that doesn't get tagged by SpamAssassin -- or just delete it. Unfortunately, some unwanted mail will go untagged, no matter what thresholds you set. If that's a significant problem for you, you can further manage spam by bringing in an additional filtering method. For example, if you are a desktop mail user, you can use the Junk Mail controls/filters that are built in to popular desktop mail programs such as Thunderbird and Outlook (please see our related page for more details).
More details on these options
Everyone can control his or her own spam blocking and filtering settings. Howevever, no matter what strategy you choose, there is no perfect system. You will still get some unwanted mail. The goal is to find the balance of wanted and unwanted mail that you can live with.
The more unwanted mail you choose to block, the higher the chance that you might block legitimate mail from senders such as your favorite store or mailing lists you've subscribed to. On the other hand, the less spam you block, well, the more you'll have to filter or manually delete.
You have a lot of control over this balance and can experiment. Choose which of the three approaches below describes you best, and that will give you a sense of the best direction to take.
Where to manage your spam blocking and tagging settings
Go to www.bu.edu/phpbin/change-entry/change.php and provide your BU Login name and Kerberos password when prompted. Once on the Directory page, scroll down to the Spam filtering section, where you can manage the settings described below.
What are your spam-management goals?
AGGRESSIVE APPROACH: I want to block as much spam as possible, even if it means a small fraction of legitimate mail gets blocked.
This is a risky approach but if you decide to take it, settings that are more restrictive than those set by default would tag mail (for use in filtering) at, for example, 4.0 or higher and ask to block it entirely at something like 6.5 or higher. Sample
MODERATE APPROACH: I want a happy medium, allowing some spam in, so that I'm pretty sure all real mail gets through.
This is the default approach. B.U. has chosen middle-of-the-road settings for you which, if you do nothing, will tag mail as suspected spam (for filtering) at 5.0 or higher and will block it entirely at 7.5 or higher. Sample
PERMISSIVE APPROACH: I'd let quite a lot of spam through, if it ensures that I'm not blocking legitimate mail.
This might be your approach if you are aware that something you hoped to get actually was blocked or filtered, or if you simply don't want to take that chance. Just to give an example, settings that are less restrictive than those set by default would tag mail as suspected spam (for filtering) at 6.0 or higher and ask to block it entirely at 8.0 or higher. Sample
I would like to filter the mail that does get through. Remind me again how to do that?
Any mail that falls in the buffer area ("tagged" but not "blocked") can be directed to a location other than your Inbox. Our filtering instructions will provide more details. If you choose not to filter, you will still get these tagged messages -- they will simply arrive in your Inbox with your legitimate mail and you will need to either delete them.
In addition, some junk messages will go untagged, no matter what thresholds you set. If that's a significant problem for you, you can further manage spam by bringing in an additional filtering method. For example, if you are a desktop mail user, you can use the Junk Mail controls/filters that are built in to popular desktop mail programs such as Thunderbird and Outlook (please see our related page for more details).