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Options
You can customize SpamBuster in a number of ways. For instance,
instead of having your spam sent to a central quarantine, you can
elect to have it 'passed through', along with the rest of your mail.
It will have the spam header tags, along with a special "Spam: YES"
tag so you can easily deal with it using whatever filtering tools your
email client provides. To make it even easier to filter spam with
your mail client, you can have the Subject line modified (Outlook
users take special note! Also see the SpamBuster FAQ at the bottom of the main SpamBuster
page.) You can specify certain senders as being on your own "good/bad
lists", irrespective of how their message might othewise score as
spam. Or you can opt-out of spam filtering altogether. You can elect
to use grey-listing (which should be a pretty effective scheme.) And
of course, you can adjust your spam threshold.
You can change your SpamBuster options at the same place where you
review your quarantined spam - look at the bottom of the page. (Links
at the left of this page.)
The options include:
| Use Javascript |
On or off (default: on)
Affects how messages are displayed by the Spam Viewer.
(default: Javascript enabled.) Can be set separately for
each machine (and browser) a user uses. (Because this setting
is stored as a cookie, not in the Preference Store.) So, you
could set this differently at home and in your office. |
| Default disposition |
Discard, Keep, Unspam (default: Discard)
When you view your quarantine, each piece of spam can be
acted upon (disposed of) in one of three ways. This option
determines which of those dispositions is selected by default
when your quarantine is presented. (You can, of course, change
the disposition of any given piece of spam, as you review
them.) |
| Default sort |
This option controls the order that messages in your
quarantine are initially displayed. While viewing your
quarantine, you can also sort by any field by clicking on the
column headings. |
| Scan my mail for spam |
Yes or No (default: Yes )
Allows you to opt-out of SpamBuster scanning altogether.
Your incoming email will not be scanned, and it will not be
tagged. It will simply be passed directly through the mail
system and into your mailbox as if the SpamBuster filters did
not exist. (This is completely different from the
'pass-through' feature!) If you have grey-listing enabled
and scanning disabled, grey-listing will still take place. |
| My spam threshold |
-100 to 1000 (default: 5.0 )
Spam scores are typically in the range of about 0-20,
although they can go much higher, and can even be negative.
Any email with a score equal to or above your personal
threshold will be labeled as spam. Any score below your
threshold will be considered "legitimate" (aka "ham".)
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| Modify Subject lines |
Yes or No (default: No)
When on, any mail identified as spam (i.e., above your
threshold) will have a special string
( "*****SPAM*****" ) inserted at the beginning of the
Subject line of the message. When off (default), the Subject
line is left unmodified. The X-UWCSE-Spam headers will be
inserted into the header of the message regardless of the
setting of this option. |
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Use Greylisting | Yes or No (default: No)
When greylisting is enabled, the first time a message from
a given sender is received, it will be rejected, and subsequent
resends will be accepted. All legitimate mail handlers will
retransmit a rejected message, usually with a 30-minute delay
(this is a mechanism in the Internet mail transport protocol
that is intended to allow the receiving mail transport agent to
throttle its incoming load). A significant amount of spam spews
from very simple mailers (embedded in spyware, for instance)
that do not implement this retransmit protocol, so this turns
out to be an effective spam-fighting technique – at least
for now. A downside is that a minor delay may be introduced in
the arrival of the very first email from each correspondant.
This would be undesirable for webstite registrations, where a
confirmation is sent via email, or a password reminder that
comes via email. But you can always disable grey-listing
temporarily when the need arises. |
| Action for my Spam |
Quarantine or Pass-thru (default: Pass-thru)
Normally, any mail identified as spam – according to
your spam threshold – will be diverted to a central Spam
Quarantine, and will not wind up in your standard inbox. If you
select "pass-through", your incoming mail will still be scanned,
tagged, and spam (as specified by your threshold) will be
identified with a special header tag. (The default of
"pass-thru" was chosen so you can make an explicit choice about
diverting your incoming mail stream, rather than have some of
your mial suddenly and mysteriously get diverted elsewhere
without your express knowledge.) The 'pass-thru' option will
allow you to filter spam using whatever filtering tools your
email client provides. For instance, you could divert it into
your own Spam folder in your mail client. This may not be a
good option when you are traveling, or if you use a dial-up
connection to read your mail, since it may cause all your spam
to be downloaded to your email client before it is filtered.
Your mileage may vary! |
| Auto-discard |
1 week-4 months (default: 3 months)
Any spam (as well as false-positives – legitimate
messages) in your quarantine will be automatically and
silently discarded if it is older than the specified age. This
happens whether you have reviewed quarantined messages or not.
This feature cannot be disabled, but you do have some control
over how long spam is kept before it is auto-discarded. |
| Treat all non-English email as spam |
On or off (default: off)
If enabled, all messages identified as not being in English will be
identified as spam. The excellent but not infallible
TextCat tool is
used to guess the language. |
|
Email from these addresses is always/never spam |
Sets of email addresses (default: certain
addresses within the university)
This pair of options allows you to establish certain addresses
as being the source of email that is always or never spam. The bad
list is useful for creating a "twitlist": a set of addresses from
whom you never wish to receive email. The latter is useful for
elminating "false positives" -- addresses from which you receive
desired mail that is falsely identified as spam. The addresses you
enter here can contain wildcards, but are not full regular
expressions. The work the same way as "filename globbing" does in
Unix shells, where, for example, a '*' matches zero or more characters
and a '?' matches a single character. By deafult, a number of
specific addresses within the university are included in your "good
list". |
SpamBuster Version 2.0
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