spamJam UBE/UCE Filter

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spamJam Overview

There are many techniques used to stop spam—UBE (Unsolicited Bulk Email) / UCE (Unsolicited Commercial Email). Unfortunately, many of these techniques are worse than the spam itself because they block a significant percentage of legitimate email and/or don't give the recipient much control. After a significant amount of research, we have chosen a product called spamJam to help combat the increasing quantity of spam we are receiving. Some of spamJam's features are listed below.

Spam is intercepted using a variety of techniques to identify inbound email as spam. It uses everything from simple content filters which search for particular words often found in spam to more sophisticated techniques such as to verify mail that purports to be from a user at AOL really is being sent by an AOL email server. Part of the attraction of spamJam is that it does not rely on blacklists which are notoriously bad and often result in a high percentage of false positives—i.e. mail identified as spam which isn't.
spamJam relies primarily on centrally managed anti-spam controls and hence requires little if any user configuration. However, it also allows individual users to set up rules to allow or deny messages.
spamJam intercepts email before it gets to your inbox and then stores it in a central database on the server. We currently retain these messages for 5 days giving you the opportunity to restore messages before they are permanently deleted.
Each day users with spamJam installed will receive an email which summarizes all the message which were intercepted the previous day. Users then have the option of reading the message, restoring the message to their own mail file, and even setting up a rule to make sure that all such future messages are not labeled as spam.
spamJam also allow users to manually configure many additional settings and to view the log of intercepted messages at any time—you don't have to wait until the next day for the spamJam email to recover intercepted messages.

Lastly, while spamJam is one of the best anti-spam tools available, please do not expect perfection. spamJam will continue to allow some spam to get through and it will also incorrectly identify some desired emails as spam. There is no such thing as a perfect anti-spam tool and spamJam is no exception. Feel free to use spamJam on a trial basis as it is very easy to uninstall if you decide you don't like it.

Avoiding Spam

While spamJam is an effective tool, it is no substitute for appropriate use of your email address. The most important rule is that you should only give your peddie.org email address to friends, family, and others whom you are certain will not allow your email to fall into the hands of spammers. You should not use your peddie.org email address for the following:

First and foremost, never use your peddie.org email address to sign up for anything "free" on the web including registering to download "free" software.
Don't use your peddie.org email in any kind of public forum such as Usenet newsgroups, instant messaging, web discussions, etc.
In general, you should NOT unsubscribe or click the "remove my address" link from spam messages. More often than not, this simply lets the spammer know that your email address is valid which will result in even more spam! The exception to this rule is when receiving spam from reputable sources. For example, if you are receiving advertisements from Amazon.com it is fine to unsubscribe from their mailing list.
In general, you should also not use your peddie.org email when purchasing products online. Again, common sense applies. The more reputable the retailer the less likely your email address will get into the hands of spammers. This applies for items purchased for school (e.g. with a school purchasing card).

Sometimes you have to use an email address for the bulleted items above. In such cases we recommend that you set up a free email account. Click here for a Google search which will list many providers of free email. There is also a web site called Free Email Providers Guide which provides a lot of useful information about free email accounts. Lastly, my personal favorite free email service is called Hotpop (http://www.hotpop.com) which provides both web based and POP3 based email. POP3 allows you to use a standard email client such as Eudora, Pegasus or Outlook Express.

Important Policy Note

It is important for you to be aware that we will not change a peddie.org email address because of spam. Without going into detail, a Peddie user's email address is used for many different things on our network from naming your computer to handling backups and our systems depend on the username being consistent across all of our systems. Furthermore, we have created a set of rules for creating usernames (typically [first initial] + [lastname] and in order for us to efficiently maintain over 650 user account we have to minimize the deviations from this convention. Because spam is such a widespread problem, if we allowed user name changes because of spam we would be faced with dozens of requests each year which would eventually make managing our accounts vastly more time consuming than it already is. Combined with all of this, it has been our experience that changing a username because of spam is at best a temporary solution. Whatever led to the email address receiving an excessive amount of spam usually causes the new email address to become the object of the same amount of spam within a few months after the change.

If an account becomes extremely difficult to use because of spam, we can offer two options:

Submit a technology request to have spamJam installed. We have found that this while this will not eliminate all spam, it greatly reduces the quantity of spam received.
In extreme cases we can block all Internet mail for a given account which will allow mail to be received only from within the Peddie email system.

Using spamJam: Basics

If you skipped the previous section about avoiding spam, please take a moment now to read it over. While spamJam is a very effective anti-spam tool, it is no substitute for being savvy about how you use your Peddie email address. Even if spamJam prevents a spam message from making it to your inbox, our mail servers still have to spend time accepting all spam and then processing it. As the volume of spam increases this places a significant strain on our servers forcing us to be more restrictive with our Internet mail policies such as the allowable size of email attachments. As a result, it is important that every mail user at Peddie do his best to reduce the amount of spam received.

Checking The Daily spamJam Message

Using spamJam is very simple, however it does involve a little work on your part to make sure valid email is not being intercepted. Once it is installed you will receive a daily email listing the spam you received the previous day. Please watch the video below for more information.

Viewing and Restoring a Message

You may view and restore messages identified as spam very easily provided the messages still exist in the temporary storage location. Typically, you will have at least one week to restore messages before they are deleted permanently. spamJam also makes it easy for you to prevent future emails from being identified as spam such as electronic newsletters that you would like to receive or advertisements from vendors which you would like to read. Please watch the video below for more information.

Viewing the spamJam Log

You may view the spamJam log at any time. One situation when you might want to do this is if you are waiting for an email which you suspect may have been intercepted by spamJam. You don't have to wait until the following morning for your daily spamJam email, instead you can view the log to see if the message you are looking was indeed intercepted by spamJam. Please watch the video below for more information.

Uninstalling spamJam

Lastly, you do not have to use spamJam. Whether or not you use it is entirely up to you. If you would like spamJam uninstalled from your mail file simple submit a technology support request and we will be glad to remove it. We can do this very easily and we do not need your computer.

Using spamJam: Advanced

As mentioned above, spamJam relies primarily on centrally managed anti-spam controls and hence requires little if any user configuration. However, it also allows individual users a lot of options to customize settings. For those who are interested in these advanced features, we have included the spamJam user's manuals below.

Basic User's Guide
This guide goes over the topics covered in the videos above as well as a few additional topics.

Advanced User's Guide
This guide covers many advanced configuration options. Note that some features described in this guide are disabled.

Last Updated: Monday, April 4, 2005