Managing Email Spam

Overview

Spam can be controlled at three levels:

It can be stopped at the mail server

Cal Poly Pomona provides a spam identification service known as "SpamAssassin" for all faculty, staff and students. This service will help you significantly reduce your spam quantities. In addition, the spam service gives you full control in managing your spam messages.

When an email message is identified as spam, the Cal Poly Pomona service appends a spam identifier to the email message. To utilize this service, you simply need to configure your email client (i.e. Outlook, Entourage, etc.) or Outlook Web Access settings to look for that spam identifier and delete or move the message accordingly. This site will assist you in configuring your email client to manage and/or filter your spam messages.

It can be stopped by the email client program

Some email clients, such as Outlook and Thunderbird, have built-in spam stoppers. Depending on the program, these may work well or poorly.

It can be stopped by a separate program that integrates with your email client

Instructions are provided for using SpamBayes, a program that works with Outlook and other programs to identify spam. Although we do not provide support for it, many users have found it to be very effective.

Combining methods is often effective

For example, the combination of SpamAssassin, SpamBayes, and the Outlook spam filter can eliminate 95% or more of spam emails.

This page was last updated on September 26, 2007.