cpSPAM Announcement
January 8th, 2004
In an effort to reduce the amount of unwanted e-mail that students, staff, and faculty currently receive, Cal Poly has instituted a SPAM rating engine that determines if an incoming e-mail message should be classified as SPAM. This new tool will not automatically delete any messages. Only you can choose to delete messages that have been marked as SPAM.
The new SPAM rating engine classifies messages as potential SPAM using a junk mail scanner that applies various rules to the message headers and text and assigns a numeric score to each message. If the score exceeds the threshold set for the campus, the rating engine will add "cpSPAM" to the subject line. Once the subject line is marked, you will be able to use filters or rules to move the marked message into a folder of your choice, or you can have the message automatically deleted.
At this time, it is strongly recommended that you create a server side filter to move your marked messages into a separate folder called "cpSPAM". Once created, you should periodically review the folder to ensure wanted messages are not being marked and to delete the junk e-mail. When you are comfortable that only unwanted e-mail is being marked, you can set a rule to automatically delete messages being classified as SPAM.
To help reduce e-mail system performance problems, faculty and staff are encouraged to review their "cpSPAM" after 10 a.m. on a normal workday. For more information on steps being taken to improve performance on the faculty/staff e-mail server, including suggestions on how you can help, please see: URL
While e-mail clients (such as Netscape Messenger/Mail, Outlook, Outlook Express, and Entourage) allow you to create client side rules on your local workstation, that action will not improve e-mail performance. Therefore, we strongly recommend you create the rules on the University e-mail server using the Web client for your Cal Poly email account, which supports server side rules. Follow the link below for directions, answers to frequently asked questions, and more information about dealing with SPAM, virus infected messages, etc.
Since messages deleted from the e-mail server cannot be recovered, we recommend filtering to the "cpSPAM" folder first before deleting. At the same time, you should continue to manage your total message store to stay under quota. This includes deleting unwanted messages and archiving messages outside the University e-mail server. If not managed properly, it may be necessary for the University to act in the future to delete aging messages in user accounts to avoid system performance and capacity problems.
If you have any questions or need assistance, please contact the ITS Service Desk at (805) 756-7000.
