Talked with Brian Martinez on the phone, here is my understanding of
the situation (of course any mistakes in this account are my own
fault and not Brian's).
Prior to Mon 22 Dec 2008, incoming e-mail got checked against the
user's settings. If they enabled campus spam filtering then the
e-mail got filtered. If it then reached a high enough score then it
got labelled and processed as spam, otherwise it got passed on with
little comment.
Starting Mon 22 Dec 2008, user spam settings are ignored. All mail
to <recipient>@msu.edu addresses that comes from <sender>@msu.edu
addresses does *not* go through the spam filter, as we presume that
intra- @msu.edu e-mail is not spam (and if so will be handled through
other administrative mechanisms, as in the Kara Spencer case, see
http://www.statenews.com/index.php/article/2008/12/asmsu_association_director_found_guilty_of_misusing_resources
). All other incoming e-mail goes through the campus spam filter,
AND (this is the point that kept getting missed) the filter now adds
the "possible spam" message that we have been seeing. E.g., since
<sender>@list.msu.edu does not come from @msu.edu, all the MSUNAG
e-mail now gets the "possible spam" header.
Since messages from @msu.edu do not get filtered, it could be said
that these addresses are whitelisted, but I do not know if that is
technically accurate. Otherwise, there is no whitelist.
So something *did* change in spam filtering, namely the boilerplate
"possible spam" message got added to *all* messages that go through
the spam filter. Users whose e-mail readers hide the headers will
never see this, and Eudora users like me may add
"TabooHeaders=X-Spam-Report" to the settings in their Eudora.ini file
to hide these (thanks Chris for that tip!).
Following the discussion here on MSUNAG, ATS is looking into tweaking
this, including setting a higher threshold for "possible spam" or
changing the wording of the message. [Editorial aside: This is
exactly why it was a good thing for the mail team to roll out this
switch while the bulk of users were gone.]
Tbanks to the mail team and everyone for getting us through the
transition to a better mail system.
-- dkm, Professional Faultfinder
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