Indiana University
  •  
  •  
  •  

At IU, what is the spam quarantine service?

On this page:

Overview

UITS provides email filtering services at Indiana University to reduce the amount of unsolicited commercial email (i.e., spam) stored on IU email servers. The services help you identify and eliminate unwanted email, and reduce the costly impact spam has on university resources.

You don't need to sign up for the service. Every email account on IU's Cyrus/Webmail and Exchange servers is included automatically.

The service analyzes all mail delivered to IU Cyrus/Webmail and Exchange accounts. Any spam messages you receive are quarantined for five days in your Spam (Cyrus/Webmail) or Junk E-mail (Exchange) folder. After five days, the spam service deletes those messages automatically.

Messages arrive in your quarantine folder in real time, so you can quickly identify any mail you want to keep. To keep a message (i.e., remove it from quarantine), simply move it to your Inbox or another folder in your account.

You can augment the service with client-side filters, rules, or junk mail features, but they are not necessary.

Filters

The spam quarantine service uses separate filters on each mail system, as follows:

  • Cyrus/Webmail: For accounts on the Cyrus email system, the spam quarantine service employs Sophos PureMessage filtering. The filter analyzes incoming email for spam potential, and then assigns each message a score from 0 to 100%. Messages scoring 45% or higher are delivered to your Spam folder, where they're quarantined for five days and then automatically deleted.

  • Exchange: For accounts on the Exchange email system, the spam quarantine service employs Microsoft's Intelligent Message Filtering (IMF), and leverages the existing anti-spam capabilities built into Exchange 2007 and Outlook Web Access (OWA). IMF scans incoming messages, and labels each with a Spam Confidence Level (SCL) rating. Messages with an SCL of 6 or higher are delivered to your Junk E-mail folder, where they are quarantined for five days and then automatically deleted.

Note: Email sent from within the IU community is not filtered.

Spam deleted automatically

Monitor your Spam or Junk E-mail folder frequently, because messages more than five days old are deleted automatically.

You cannot retrieve email purged from the Spam folder in Cyrus/Webmail. However, email purged from the Junk E-mail folder on Exchange is available for recovery from the 15-day retention area. For instructions, see At IU, how can I recover deleted items in Outlook if I am an Exchange user?

False positives

The spam quarantine service may deliver some false positives (i.e., messages that you want to keep) to your Spam or Junk E-mail folder. To keep a message that arrives in your Spam or Junk E-mail folder, move it to another folder. In Exchange, you can prevent future false positives by adding the sender to your Safe Senders list. In Cyrus/Webmail, you can add the sender to your Whitelist filter rule; see In IU Webmail, how do I use the Whitelist filter rule to avoid having legitimate mail quarantined as spam?

Filtering during your vacation (or opting out)

If you're going away on vacation, or are otherwise unable to monitor your email account for five days, or if you'd rather not participate in the spam quarantine service at all, you can easily opt out of the service to prevent the system from deleting messages from your quarantine folder.

Existing client-side filtering

You don't need to enable any client-side filtering to participate in the spam quarantine service. However, you can choose to augment this service with client-side filters, rules, or junk mail features.

The spam quarantine service is compatible with the filtering rules in Cyrus/Webmail, which you can use to augment the PureMessage filtering if needed. See At IU, how can I filter my incoming Cyrus mail?

If you use Outlook 2003 or 2007 to read your Exchange account, you can run Outlook with Cached Exchange Mode enabled or disabled. Running in Cached Exchange Mode, you can use Outlook's Junk E-mail filter to augment the IMF filter on the Exchange server. See Using Outlook 2003 and 2007, how can I control junk email?

Also, any addresses on your Safe Senders and Block Senders lists will remain on the Exchange server, which will continue to process them in real-time. Addresses in your Safe Senders list and Contacts will override IMF.

Note: If you're using Entourage to read your Exchange account, you should consider not using client-side filtering, because it can generate false positives for messages from IU senders.