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Chris Wolf writes: 

> I wasn't aware that there was a new spam filter; can someone from the mail
> team comment? The only recent change I know of is the complete blocking of
> mail from "ill-behaved" servers, but that mail never reaches the spam filter
> (or your spam mailbox). 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Cheryl A Akers [mailto:[log in to unmask]] 
> Sent: Tuesday, April 03, 2007 5:18 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: [MSUNAG] Beware of the new SPAM filter (fwd) 
> 
> These posts seem to be mis-classified as SPAM by mail.msu.edu because of the
> use of HTML, anyone else having this problem?  
> 
>  From one of my faculty:  
> 
> Checking my SPAM box today, I found a message from AAAs, one announcement
> from France of  an HIV workshop, an announcement from the UK of on line Talk
> of the month programme that includes by Roger Kornberg and other highly
> respected scientists, one from Natural Standard on E coli and Norovirus
> outbreaks, as well as an internal MSU seminar reminder...
> I called the help line! The only thing we can do is make a list of trusted
> addresses in our preference box!!!  
> 
> IN the meantime, you might like to read your SPAM  
> 
 

Chris, 

We haven't added any additional spam filtering. We've used the same set of 
spamassassin rule-sets for awhile, periodically updating them during planned 
maintenances. Spammassassin itself was updated to address some security 
issues, and its possible that some of the point values have become too 
aggressive in the existing sets. 

HTML mail messages have traditionally triggered more hits as being possible 
spam. I generally recommend that users add their emailing lists to their 
trusted senders if they're getting false hits. I haven't seen that many 
false positives where this wasn't an acceptable solution. 

If anyone is seeing false positives, I encourage you to report the messages 
to the ACNS Help desk so that we'll have an idea if theres a larger 
underlying problem here. I believe Cheryl had a report today, but I've seen 
possibly one other problem in the last few months that's been reported. 

Thanks,
Ed