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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