Spam filter service

The University as part of its duty of care to staff and students manages a spam filter service. See University Spam policy.
The default situation will be that your email will be filtered to remove spam.
This will affect you in the following ways (except those that use certain locally run mail services.)

1. You should notice a reduction in the number of spam emails you receive

   The Spam Filter service is based on the automatic recognition of characteristics that are present in spam email messages. Typical characteristics would be an email subject line that contained ALL CAPITALS, signs of counterfeit email origin or common advertising phrases. The Spam Filter service uses many hundreds of characteristics and when an email message sent to you exhibits a number of spam characteristics simultaneously, it will be rejected before it arrives at your In-box. By itself, no individual phrase or other characteristic is sufficient to cause any message to be rejected. For more details, see .

   Rejected messages will generate an automatic error message that will inform the sender why it was rejected. In the unlikely event of a non-spam message being rejected, this will allow the sender to re-phrase and resend their message. This information is useful to a legitimate sender, but will be of little or no use to spammers as they almost always use counterfeit sender addresses or discard any error messages automatically.
   
   Also note that the Spam Filter service will only filter emails that originate from outside the university. Outgoing or internal mail sent BY members of the University will not be filtered.
   

2. You will receive some Emails labeled [SPAM?]

   In the majority of cases, the automatic filtering process is able to unambiguously identify spam emails and hence reject them outright as described above. In a minority of cases, this is not possible. In such cases the message will be forwarded with the subject line tagged as [SPAM?]. You can use this as a guide to help decide whether or not to open the message. We do however recommend you do not delete mail which has been tagged as [SPAM?] without first checking for familiar senders or subject lines.