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What we're doing:
We have recently upgraded our email server and spam blocking software. This has been done to help control the amount of "Unsolicited Bulk Email" (UBE) and "Unsolicited Commercial Email" (UCE), collectively known as "Spam".  In addition, the system will soon be configured to find and delete emails with known "malware" attacks (such as invalid MIME headers etc.).  IT WILL NOT SCAN YOUR EMAILS FOR VIRUSES!  You are still responsible for installing a virus scanning package on your system and, equally importantly, keeping it up to date.

How it works:
Messages that appear to be spam will be marked as such, with a subject of "*****SPAM*****" followed by the original subject of the message.  Instructions are posted below on how to configure your email client to filter emails with the "*****SPAM*****" header, so that you may review and delete them at your convenience.
Our servers will use a scoring system to decide whether a message should be marked as spam or not.  The score is generated by a number of factors, including keywords, phrases, attachments, sender and recipient addresses, etc..  The higher the score, the higher the probability that the message is spam.

Why not just delete messages marked as Spam?
In some cases, we will.  Messages that receive a high enough score (greater than 15) will be automatically deleted.  Our system has been independently tested to have a "false positive" rate of 0.05%.  That means that out of 10,000 messages marked as "Definitely" Spam, there will be roughly 5 that were not.  However, while our servers use state of the art methods to detect and mark spam, they are still just computers, and therefore have no ability to intuit whether a message is actually spam, or just an email (perhaps one about spam!) that happens to get a relatively high score.  In that vein, messages receiving a score between 5-15 will be forwarded to you, and marked as spam.  Imagine how upset you'd be if our servers kept deleting a real message that you needed to receive!  We feel that you are in a much better position to know whether an email is junk than our servers; we're just trying to help keep your "INBOX" a little cleaner, and make you wade through less junk to get to the "real" emails you need.

Can I have the servers not check my messages?
Um,  well, we'd prefer not to skip mailboxes; the administration of keeping individual filtering rules would be prohibitive both in terms of time and expense, not to mention load on our servers.  This is another reason that we're only marking messages as spam rather than deleting them:  You can decide how your email client responds to messages marked as spam, from deleting them outright to doing absolutely nothing!

Instructions for Deleting messages marked as "spam" using Outlook Express:

 

 1) Clicking on the [Start] button, go to [Programs] and select [Outlook Express].

 2) Click [Tools], go to [Message Rules], then select [Mail].

 3) Click [New].

 4) Under [Select the Conditions for your rule], select [Where the Subject line contains specific words].

 5) Under [Select the Actions for your rule], select [Move it to the specified folder].

 6) In this example, two links show up in the [Rule Description] window. Click on the first link labeled [contains specific words].

 7) In the [Type Specific Words] window, enter "spam"  and click Add.

 8) Click [OK].

 9) Now, under [Rule Description], click on the [specified] link.

10) Select the folder you would like to have the email moved to. We've selected [Deleted Items].

11) Click on [OK].

12) In the [Name of rule] box, specify a name for your rule. We've called ours "Spam Rule".

13) Click on [OK].

14) Click [Apply Now].

15) Click on [OK].

This example created a filter that looks for "spam" in the Subject line of an email. If it finds a message with "spam" in the Subject line, it will then move it to the Deleted Items folder.  You can still view these messages in the Deleted Items folder to make sure it is legitimate spam.