A spam filter known as the Spamassasin is utilized by the CC on the central server systems in order to distinguish spam from all the in coming e-mail. E-mail identified as spam by the Spamassasin is directed to an allocated e-mail box, called the SPAMBOX, located under the mail folder of the account of the recipient.

What is SpamAssassin?

SpamAssassin is a mail filter to identify spam. It is an intelligent email filter which uses a diverse range of tests to identify unsolicited bulk email, more commonly known as spam. These tests are applied to email headers and content to classify email using advanced statistical methods. In addition, SpamAssassin has a modular architecture that allows other technologies to be quickly wielded against spam and is designed for easy integration into virtually any email system.

How it works

This flexible and powerful set of Perl programs, unlike older spam filtering approaches, uses the combined score from multiple types of checks to determine if a given message is spam.

Its primary features are:

• Header tests

• Body phrase tests

• Bayesian filtering

• Automatic address whitelist/blacklist

• Manual address whitelist/blacklist

• Collaborative spam identification databases

• DNS Blocklists, also known as "RBLs" or "Realtime Blackhole Lists".

• Character sets and locales

SPAMBOX Message Box

Depending on the e-mail browser program being used, you can find information on how to access the SPAMBOX e-mail box(es) at Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) -> E-mail services.

Forward mail, which has been misidentified and marked as spam and routed to your SPAMBOX, to hot-line@metu.edu.tr address with full header info and the body sections. The spam filter will be rearranged so that such and similar mail will not be marked as spam in the future.

SPAMBOX e-mail boxes are kept under the home folder of the users and use up disk space on their allocated disk quota. Therefore it is strongly recommended that users check and delete their SPAMBOX contents regularly.

SPAMBOX folders that exceed a certain size are renamed and carried to anoyher space under the home folder of the user. These folders are kept for another seven days and then deleted automatically.