From: Chebucto Community Net

To: Chebucto Community Net

Subject: New Chebucto mail spam filter

Date: Tue, 10 Sep 2002 13:55:33 -0300

Hi. The Chebucto Community Net is pleased to announce our new virus and spam (unsolicited commercial email messages) mail filtering service. You can now choose to filter out junk email from your Chebucto mailbox.

All users can set their mail filtering preferences at http://nospam.chebucto.ca

Chebucto text-based users can also access this using the g)o spam shortcut (that is, while in Lynx type gspam then hit Enter or Return).

Please read on for more information.

Virus filtering will be done on all incoming mail automatically and the user receiving the mail will get the text of the message and a description of the virus. The virus itself will be deleted from the message. We are using the F-Prot antivirus program with new virus definitions updated daily.

Users will have a choice about spam mail filtering. You can choose to have all spam deleted automatically from new incoming mail, to have the spam forwarded to a special JUNKMAIL folder, or to have no spam filtering done at all. Chebucto is using Spam Assassin to filter spam from new incoming mail. Spam Assassin examines an email letter then assigns a point value for each part of the letter that is like spam. When a letter gets too many points, it is identified as spam. What happens after that is up to you.

When you choose to have no filtering done, you will receive all mail coming to your account. Spam will be labelled as spam in the full message headers, but you will receive the full unedited message without interference.

When you choose to have the spam filtered and stored, all messages labelled as spam will not go into your main Chebucto mailbox. Instead, they will be sent to a folder called JUNKMAIL which is in your mail folder on Chebucto. This JUNKMAIL folder can be accessed using the Chebucto WebMail service (available from the Chebucto home page http://www.chebucto.ns.ca/ ), or with PINE through the Chebucto text-based interface. If you select this option you will be able to review the messages marked as spam yourself and delete anything you do not want. Please note that the JUNKMAIL folder will grow in size over time and counts against your disk space quota usage. It will be your ongoing responsibility to keep this folder empty by regularly deleting the mail in it yourself. Going over disk quota can result in many Chebucto services not working until the excess has been deleted.

Lastly, you can choose to have the mail identified as spam deleted from your new incoming mail. If you choose this option, then all spam is deleted before it gets to your mailbox. Chebucto will not be keeping copies of these messages so anything that is filtered will be gone completely.

We have put in these mail filters because the volume of spam and virus-laden mail has more than tripled in the last year and this was one of the main issues our users told us about at the last Chebucto Annual General Meeting. We listened to everyone's concerns and now have put this new mail filtering system in place.

You can change your mail filtering preferences at any time by going to the mail filtering preferences page listed at the beginning of this letter. For the next month, the default will be no filtering on all Chebucto user accounts unless it is requested. After this month, any accounts which have not set a preference at all will have their incoming mail filtered and the spam deleted. Users can change this default choice at any time.

We want to advise our users that while we will do our best to filter all incoming email viruses and correctly identify spam email, no system is perfect. You should still have up-to-date virus protection for your home computer and recognize that spam filtering can sometimes label as spam legitimate mail that happens to resemble spam. Use of the spam mail filter is at your own risk. Details on how to let us know about legitimate mail incorrectly labelled as spam can be found on the mail filtering preferences page. The Chebucto mail spam filtering will not work for mailboxes set to forward to other service providers, however all mail coming to your Chebucto mailbox will be tagged in the message full headers. You or your other service provider could then set up a filter for messages marked: X-Is-Spam: Yes