This post 58% likely to be spam
Posted 11 Apr, 2005 at 15:19 by matt in /Technical | Permanent link
So my institution has a somewhat overactive spam filter. We've got one or two programs that scan incoming mail and give each item a spam rating; then there's a default rule in our installation of GroupWise which shuffles items with overly high scores into a junk
folder.
My first problem with this is that an inordinate number of e-mails from students seem to get high spam ratings: maybe because they're short, or don't use my full name (addressing me instead as "Professor"), or come from Hotmail, or have attachments, or any number of other things. This isn't a tremendous deal; it means that I need to check the junk folder fairly frequently, though, and wade through the actual spam that accumulates. This, I feel, defeats the purpose.
I should, you might think, be able to turn off the rule that does the sorting... or at least modify it to my own nefarious ends, right? Not so much with the nefariousness, it seems. The ability to create or modify sorting rules doesn't seem to exist in the cross-platform
version of GroupWise that I, an OS X user, have access to. (I rarely use the client anyway -- it's pretty broken in a number of ways -- but I'd at least hoped that it would do this correctly.)
I asked our tech support people if there was a secret password or something that students could use to avoid getting relegated to the junk folder. I got some really quite blank looks in response, followed by suggestions that I go into GroupWise and change the rules for spam filtering.
Not, you will note, entirely helpful.