At IU, what is the spam quarantine service?

• Overview
• Filters
• Spam deleted automatically
• False positives
• Filtering during your vacation (or opting out)
• Existing client-side filtering

Overview

UITS provides filtering services on all email accounts at Indiana University to reduce the amount of unsolicited commercial email (i.e., spam) stored on IU email servers. The services help you identify and eliminate unwanted email, and reduce the costly impact spam has on university resources.

The service analyzes all mail delivered to IU Exchange accounts. Messages marked as spam are quarantined for five days in your Junk E-mail (Exchange) folder, and then are deleted automatically.

Filters

The service leverages the anti-spam capabilities built into Exchange and Outlook Web App (OWA). Exchange scans incoming messages and labels each one with a Spam Confidence Level (SCL) rating. Messages with an SCL of 6 or higher are delivered to your Junk E-mail folder, where they're quarantined for five days and then automatically deleted.

Email sent from within the IU community is not filtered.

Spam deleted automatically

Monitor your Junk E-mail folder frequently, since messages more than five days old are deleted automatically.

Email purged from the Junk E-mail folder on Exchange is available for recovery from the 180-day retention area.

False positives

The spam quarantine service may deliver some false positives (i.e., messages that you want to keep) to your Junk E-mail folder. To keep such a message, move it to another folder. In Exchange, you can prevent future false positives by adding the sender to your Safe Senders list.

Filtering during your vacation (or opting out)

If you're going away on vacation, or are otherwise unable to monitor your email account for five days, or if you'd rather not participate in the spam quarantine service at all, you can opt out of the service.

Existing client-side filtering

You don't need to enable any client-side filtering to participate in the spam quarantine service, but you can choose to augment the service with client-side filters, rules, or junk mail features.

If you use Outlook to read your Exchange account, you can have Cached Exchange Mode enabled to use Outlook's Junk E-mail filter to augment the anti-spam filter on the Exchange server.