The CS department mail servers are using a product called PureMessage that tries to identify email as spam. When it finds a message that it thinks is spam (based on an extensive set of rules and tests) it adds "[SPAM: #" to the Subject: line of the message and also encodes this information into the X-Perlmx-Spam: header. This makes it easy for user mail filters (such as procmail and those built into many mail programs like firefox) to filter this spam. Please see the Spam Filtering FAQ Entry and the Email Virus and Spam Filtering Policy Page for more information about spam and virus protection measures in place.

Some legitimate email will invariably be incorrectly tagged as spam by these filters. When this happens you can do the following:

1. You can look at the X-Perlmx-Spam: header in the message (you may need to tell your mail client to show All headers, or Extended Headers). In this header, you will find a listing of the spam rules this message matched. This may give you some insight into why this message is tagged as spam. In some cases, the problem can be resolved by the sender but in most cases we will need to whitelist the sender as explained in the next option.

2. In many cases, we will need to whitelist this sender to prevent their email from being tagged as spam. In order to get a sender whitelisted, please send us the message headers from a sample message and we will take care of it. Please be sure to remove any sensitive information from what you send us. We will only need the message headers and not the body of the message or Subject: line.

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