Since UC Davis began filtering campus email for spam in Spring 2003, countless users have experienced relief from the barrage of junk email in their inboxes. Read on to discover how to set up spam filtering (if you haven’t already), how to filter spam from your electronic mailing list, and upcoming new spam filtering features.

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Spam Filtering Options
A spam-tagging program tags certain words as spam and allows your email program to filter out messages containing those words. Unfortunately, filtering is not perfect and the process may fail to identify spam as such (otherwise known as a ‘false negative’) or may misidentify desired messages as spam (a ‘false positive’).

Stronger Filtering Options Coming Soon
To enhance current spam filtering measures, the campus plans to implement both ‘black’ and ‘white’ lists. Black lists consist of known spammers; all email sent from a name or location on the black list will be stopped before it reaches your inbox. On the other hand, white lists consist of names of approved sources (e.g., campus officials) whose email will never be diverted from your inbox by the spam filtering program. Thus, the white lists prevent the program from misidentifying official campus messages as spam.

For more information about all of these options, visit the Computer and Network Security Web site at http://security.ucdavis.edu/spam.cfm.