Dealing with Unsolicited E-mails (Spams)

The departmental mail server filters all incoming E-mail and if it recognizes an unsolicited E-mail (spam) it puts "=[FLAGGED AS SPAM]=" in its Subject line. It is at the discretion of the account holder to set up his/her mail client in such a way that it would put these flagged messages into a separate folder and either delete them or keep them for further inspection.

The anti-spam system implemented on alchemy uses several phases of spam recognition and it is quite sophisticated. It is based on open source products coupled with home made additions. As with any such system, mistakes can be made. Senders of bulk unsolicited E-mail (spammers) regularly test their messages against widely used anti-spam filters and modify them to bypass these filters. Therefore it is sometimes difficult for our anti-spam filters to correctly distinguish between spam and ham.

You can help make our filters better by providing us with messages that have been flagged incorrectly. If you receive a legitimate E-mail that has been falsely flagged as spam (false positive), please bounce it to legit@chem.utoronto.ca. If you receive a junk E-mail that has not been recognized as spam even when it is a spam, please bounce it to junk@chem.utoronto.ca. It is very important to use bouncing as opposed to forwarding. If you use the departmental WebMail, please use the "Redirect" function to bounce a message. Information about other mail clients is available at http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/ResendingMailWithHeaders.

For Outlook 2007 users

In Outlook 2007 you can easily resend the message by double-clicking on the message so it opens in a new window, in the Actions group click on Other Actions and scroll down to Resend This Message... Click Yes if the warning appears. In the "To" section, remove your address and type junk@chem.utoronto.ca. Click Send.

If you regularly receive E-mail from various interest lists, vendors or manufacturers, please provide us with a sample of such E-mails so that we can put the senders on our white list. These message are often mistaken for spam and the white list will guarantee they will be delivered to you unflagged. White list is a list of senders that will not be subjected to spam filtering.

A word of caution: If you forward an E-mail to yourself from some outside E-mail account, the white listing will not work. Forwarding destroys the information about the original sender and replaces it with the name of the forwarding server, making it impossible for the white list to recognize the message correctly. Therefore, please always use your chem.utoronto.ca address when subscribing to E-mail lists.

If you forward your E-mail to an outside E-mail account, the spam filtering will not work. Our spam filters work at the point of delivery which in case of forwarding is not in your local account. The forwarded mail is not analyzed in any way and it is simply bounced to your outside account. Therefore you may see a lot of spam there that you would not normally see if you did not forward your mail to an account outside of chemistry.

NEVER reply to messages asking for your login name and passwords and any other personal identification information (birthday, residency address, bank account numbers, credit card numbers etc.).

No legitimate entity would ever ask for your password in an E-mail. If you receive any such suspicious E-mail, please bounce it to junk@chem.utoronto.ca immediately.