The CS department mail servers are using a product called PureMessage that tries to identify email as spam as described in the associated FAQ entry. When a message is identified as being spam, a special SPAM: tag is added to the Subject line of the message. There is currently no way to opt out of this mail filtering system but you can use procmail to counteract PureMessage and remove the SPAM tag from the mail message. In order to do this, you should first set your account up to use procmail as described in the procmail section of the Spam filtering FAQ entry. In order to use procmail to remove the SPAM tag from the Subject: line of all incoming mail messages, you would create a .procmailrc file that contains:

MAILDIR=$HOME/mail

:0 fhw
| /usr/local/bin/despamify

If you are already using procmail, just make sure that this one despamify recipe is the first recipe in your .procmailrc. All other recipes in your .procmailrc will be applied after the Subject: line is rewritten by despamify.

If your primary motivation for wanting to do this is that certain email is being falsely identified as spam by PureMessage, there may be a better way. We can adjust the rules and add senders to what is called a whitelist to prevent these false positives. You are encouraged to forward copies of any such false positives to sysadm if you want us to try and whitelist certain senders.

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