Spam Filtering at Notre Dame

Update 1/24/08: MySpam Issues and Status

What Is Spam Filtering?
How Does Spam Filtering Work?
Using Your Spam Quarantine
Modifying Your Quarantine Notifications
Importing Your Whitelist

What is spam filtering?

Beginning in August 2007, a new campus-wide spam filter (the Sendmail Sentrion) was enabled for all Notre Dame e-mail accounts. Messages from e-mail accounts you may have with other servers (Yahoo, Hotmail, etc.) that are forwarded to your Notre Dame account will also be automatically filtered for spam. The Sendmail Sentrion product was chosen for its ease of use, the ability to handle the load of email messages coming into Notre Dame from the outside world, and for its reliability, thus enabling the e-mail service to run at its normal high speed.

Only messages originating from outside the Notre Dame network are scanned by the spam filter. Messages sent from a Notre Dame e-mail account, using the Notre Dame e-mail servers, to other Notre Dame e-mail users will NOT be filtered.

How does it work?

As new messages arrive, the spam filter scans each message using a variety of services to determine if it is likely spam or not. If a message is suspected to be spam, the message is delivered to your personal quarantine box. If the message appear to be legitimate, the message is delivered to your regular Notre Dame inbox. The quarantine box will send you a summary message on a regular basis to help you review the contents of your quarantine.

You will be able to view quarantined messages and decide whether to have each message released to your inbox, allowed (a.k.a. whitelisted and then released) so that the sender’s messages will no longer be considered spam, or blocked (a.k.a. blacklisted). If no action is taken, quarantined messages will automatically be deleted after 30 days.