The CAT is running SpamAssassin on its mail servers. Our current strategy is to have SpamAssassin work at an early stage of the mail reception chain, filtering out identified spam before it hits users' mailboxes.

For a graphical representation of our spam filtering process refer to  this graph.

Note: the same process is used for both incoming mail and outgoing mail. 

1. I don't like all this filtering; can you just leave my mail alone?

Send mail to support@cat.pdx.edu if you wish to opt-out. (In the future, this might be supported on a web page.)

2. Other sites are blocking us. Will this make that worse?

This change can't make that any worse. Visibility of PSU-Maseeh College mail will probably stay the same, but hopefully this will make that better, in that .forwards won't be forwarding as much spam from our servers.

3. Will this be very aggressive? Some e-mail providers drop too much of my mail.

We'll be filtering at a conservative setting to minimize false positives. Other providers filter more strictly than we do in an effort to keep their servers' load down.

4. Will the senders of mail that appears to be spam be informed of its non-delivery?

Yes. The sender's mailserver will inform the sender when our mailservers reject mail marked as spam.

5. Will mail be filtered before aliases, .forwards, and vacation messages?

Mail will be filtered as it reaches our mail servers. This will happen before alias expansion, .forwards, vacation messages or other local delivery filters. This means that users will get fewer bounces of spam from vacation programs, and that .forwards to other sites will forward less spam.

6. Will this block all my international correspondents?

The blocking you are likely to see is essentially the same as what you've been seeing flagged as spam (with ***SPAM*** in the subject line). This does not automatically block all mail from international correspondents or even from bad mail relays, but only considers that as a part of its score-based decision system.

7. If I opt out, can I still perform filtering on my mail program?

Yes. Whatever filtering you did on your mail program (Outlook, Eudora, Netscape) will continue to work on whatever spam you receive.

8. If I opt out, can I still continue to get SpamAssassin to perform filtering for me?

Yes. If you are familiar with using procmail on UNIX, you can continue to filter based on SpamAssassin. Check out this link at ualberta for some details:

http://ugweb.cs.ualberta.ca/howtos/spamassassin.html

9. Can legitimate e-mail get marked as spam and discarded?

Yes, it is rare but it can. And sometimes, it may be something important, like an airline reservation confirmation. The spam catcher has a scoring mechanism that ranks the content of the e-mail and some pieces of legitimate e-mail may have items that bump up the score until it decides to flag it as spam.

10. How can I ensure that legitimate e-mail is not marked as spam?

You will have to work with us here. Sometimes, we may opt you out (so you get all the spam) and then have you send us a specimen of the legitimate e-mail so that we can work it into our spam filtering. (We white list it, which means that the spam catcher will ignore it regardless of its spam score.) Then, we continue filtering out your spam.

Or, see 7) and 8) to perform your own custom filtering.