Preventing Spam: Spam Filtering Overview

Georgetown University uses Ironport's anti-spam service and filters to reduce the amount of spam arriving in user mailboxes.

The service uses many different pieces of information to rate how likely it is for a message to be spam. Messages that are identified as spam are dropped and not delivered to your inbox. The software does this in two steps:

First, the software marks how likely it is for an email to be spam. Using information such as sender reputation, message content, message context and other factors, the new service scores emails as either:

             Highly likely to be spam, marking the email with a "positive" line tag

             Potentially likely to be spam, marking the email with a "suspect" line tag

             Unlikely to be spam, and delivers the email with no tag

After marking the message, the software sends the messages through a filter, and any email that is marked "positive" as spam is dropped (not delivered).  There is a small chance of false positives, or misidentifying a message as being spam, and not delivering it, when it is actually a legitimate e-mail. If a message is dropped, neither the sender or nor the intended recipient of the email will be notified.

Any message not marked as spam "positive" will be delivered to your mail box.  You may set up a filter in your e-mail client to automatically move the "suspect" marked messages to another folder.  Please visit one of the following pages for step-by-step directions:

Setting up aggressive spam filters for Thunderbird users

Setting up aggressive spam filters for Outlook users

Setting up aggressive spam filters for Apple Mail users