Electronic Mail at Uni Wuppertal

Spam mail is annoying the e-mail user. Some background about spam and advices about using our automatic spam filtering are given here.

Spam - what is it?

More and more the internet community is contending with persons and companies, who bombard it with meaningless mails because of commercial reasons: SPAM.

The consequences for users:

• They are harassed and have to divede SPAM from useful things.
  
• Many users pay for getting e-mail (firsthand or indirectly via telephone bill)
• The mail folder becomes cluttered.
• Sensible communication methods like news or mailing lists become useless.

What to do with SPAM?

There is only one reaction: DELETE! Never answer! If you answer to such a mail, the SPAMMER knows he was successful. Sometimes you are told to be registered in a list. By sending a mail to a specific address your address is deleted. That is a lie, too. Don't sent a mail, delete it!

A very comfortable way to do this is our spam filtering.

Where the name SPAM comes from

and some further information about this as well as some legal and economical views or e.g. manipulation of mail addresses can be read in the HRZ Info 18.

htt/The automatic spam filtering of ZIM

ZIM provides an automatic spam filtering. Because of legal reasons it is preset not to control the mails (Level 0). The user retains the whole control: You have to activate the filtering yourself.

The idea

The idea of the spam filtering works on two levels:

• The central mail server of Wuppertal University classifies the mails and adds a notice about spam filtering to the header.
• A second filter can separate the spam mails: to a special folder or directly to "Nowhere", if you wish so.

Every user who has a central ZIM account (e-mail address name@uni-wuppertal.de) can use this service, that means all students and the most members of the university. The "severity" of filtering can be choosen by the user himself.

The filtering differentiates between:

• "clean mail" - no spam
• mail, which probably is spam
• mail, which is spam in all probability

Preconditions

Full function of filtering is guaranteed if:

• you use the IMAP protocol rather the Webmail Service;
• you have a subfolder Junk in your inbox folder.

Without this subfolder spam filtering will not work well. If you want it is created automatically when you configure the spam filtering. IMAP- or Webmail users can create the folder themselves. Please mind correct writing of the folder name.

Level of filtering

You can choose between 4 level of filtering:

• Level 0 - no filtering of e-mails;
• Level 1 moves "spam in all probability" to the junk folder;
• Level 2 moves "probable spam" to the junk folder;
• Level 3 deletes irrevocably all "spam in all probability" and moves "probable spam" to the junk folder.

The subfolder Junk could contain "wrong positive" that means "clean" mails. These e-mails can be saved simply e.g. by moving them back into the inbox folder.

Configuration of filtering

Ihre Filterstufe wählen Sie auf der Seite aus, auf der Sie auch Mail-Alias und Mail-Forward einstellen können:

Choose your level of filtering on the following website:

• Configure/change level of filtering
  

Level 0 is preset (no filtering).

NOTICE: Changes become active at the earliest next hour on the hour.

Our Counselling Service (Phone 439-3295) will respond to potential questions.

Constrictions using POP3

Sollten Sie Ihre E-Mails über POP3 (PostOffice Protocol version 3) abholen, dann gelten für Sie eine Reihe von Einschränkungen, da POP3 nicht mit Unterordnern, also auch nicht mit Junk umgehen kann:

There are some constrictions If you get your e-mails using POP3 (PostOffice Protocol version 3. POP3 is not able to handle subfolders such as Junk.

• If you haven't create a subfolder Junk the spam still is put into the inbox on your pc :-(
• If you created a subfolder Junk spam gets there as wanted. But you as well as POP3 will not see it...... May be your mailbox even overflows :-(

Remedy: Use IMAP. If you need to use POP3 please manage the subfolder Junk by using Webmail, i.e. looking for spams, delete subfolders, create folders and so on ....

Further Informations

Our spam filtering was established in the HRZ Info 20. Here you can also see some more facts about spam.

E-mail Constrictions

Our mail server worked under huge pressure because of relaying and also more and more users moaned about more and more spam. So we established some constrictions to solve this problem:

• The server only works with computers registered in the name server.
• The server veryfied the sender's mail address to be valid. Sender Addresses found to be absurd will be rejected.
• The server rejects relaying from outside university, if the destination address ist not within the university (not equal name@xxx.uni-wuppertal.de). You can use the mail server as an external user by authentifying. This can be configured in the mail client.

 

Spam mail is the plague for all eMail users and postmasters. We give some informations about spam and how to configure our automatical Spam filter.

 

Spam mail is the plague for all eMail users and postmasters.

We give some informations about spam and how to configure our

automatical Spam filter.