Iowa State University IT

Coping with Spam Using Ximian Evolution

Coping with Spam Using Ximian Evolution

published by Information Technology Services

Handout LAG 344 - June 2006

1 What is Spam?

Spam is a slang term for unsolicited commercial email. 

2 Why Do I Get Spam?

It's simple; because your email address is widely distributed, it gets put into electronic mailing lists. If you have put your email address on a webpage, used it to post to an online forum or newsgroup, or included it when filling out a form on a commercial website, more than likely your address will wind up in a commercial mailing list. Some Windows viruses (particularly the Lovgate series) are believed to harvest email addresses from the files of the machines they infect and send them to spammers. Besides that, the addresses of staff members at Iowa State University are public records by Iowa law and must be made available to whoever asks. And yes, unless you specifically tell it not to, your student email address can be sold by the university to selected mailers.

3 How Can I Make Spam Go Away?

You will probably never be able to completely eliminate spam from your inbox. Even the best of filters will only catch part of the junk mail sent to you. Even if you change your email address, it will only give you a brief respite until your new address is harvested from somewhere on the Web. However, there are steps you can take to reduce the amount of spam you receive.

Unsubscribe from groups you are no longer using Some of the spam you receive probably is not precisely spam. If you signed up for something on a webpage, such as requesting information or downloading or registering a software package you purchased, you may have inadvertently asked them to send you mail - and that is not spam. If you really have subscribed to a newsletter and you no longer want to receive it, unsubscribe from it. Check the text of the message; there is often an unsubscribe link or an email address to send a message to be removed from the list. However, do not try this on unsolicited email messages, since less scrupulous spammers will simply use your unsubscribe request as an indication that your email address is active and send you more spam.

Use an alternative email address in commercial webpages Instead of using your primary email address to sign in to commercial webpages, establish another account with one of the free providers like Yahoo, Netscape, or Hotmail, and use that address instead. (Yahoo is especially good, as it allows you to create hundreds of unique addresses.) That way, you will keep your spam separate from the real messages. Be polite, though; log in to those accounts periodically and delete the spam.

Use filters in your email client Most of the email clients you can use to read email give you filters to sort your mail into different mailboxes based on sender, subject, and other criteria. Those filters can be used to make spam go away as well.

To help your mail client in this quest, Iowa State has provided a "spam tagging" system called PerlMX. PerlMX examines all the messages that come to @iastate.edu addresses from outside the university and calculates the probability that the message is spam. That information is placed in a special header that you will not normally see, but which most mail clients use to filter the email into spam and non-spam categories.

4 Using Filters in Ximian Evolution

Ximian Evolution is an email client for Linux similar to Microsoft Outlook. It is installed by many Linux distributions, including Red Hat 9, Fedora Base 1, and SuSE Linux. Evolution has the ability to filter on an arbitrary header as well as on the send and receive addresses.



4.1 Using PerlMX Headers

  1. Click "Inbox" to display the Inbox.
  2. Click "Tools" and select "Filters".
  3. In the Filters window, click "Add".
  4. Enter a name for the filter under Rule name:.
  5. Under If, choose "Specific Header" in the leftmost button menu.
  6. In the field to the right of Specific Header, enter X-PerlMX-Spam.
  7. In the button menu to the right of the text field, choose "starts with".
  8. In the text field to the right of begins with enter Gauge=XXXX. This will filter mail the PerlMX system has estimated has at least a 40 percent chance of being spam (one X represents ten percent). If you want a lower percentage, reduce the number of Xs; increase the number of Xs to raise the percentage.
  9. Under Then, choose "Move to Folder" in the leftmost button menu.
  10. Click "click here to select a folder".
  11. Click "New", enter SPAM as the folder name, select "Local Folders", and then click "OK" four times.

4.2 Additional Filters

To automatically file a message you have received from a specific sender into a folder, do the following

  1. Click "Inbox" to display the Inbox.
  2. Click "Tools" and select "Filters".
  3. In the Filters window, click "Add".
  4. Enter a name for the filter.
  5. Under If, choose "Sender" in the leftmost button menu.
  6. In the menu to the right of Sender, choose "contains".
  7. Enter the address to be filtered in the field to the right of that.
  8. Under Then, choose "Move to Folder" in the leftmost button menu.
  9. Click "click here to select a folder".
  10. Click "New", enter a descriptive name for the folder, select "Local Folders", and then click "OK" three times.
  11. With the new filter name highlighted, click "Up" until the name appears at the top of the list. Then click "OK".

 


Evolution and Ximian are registered trademarks of Novell, Inc. All other names are registered trademarks or trademarks of their respective companies.

Coping with Spam Using Ximian Evolution was written by Jeff Balvanz. For more assistance, contact the Solution Center by phone at 515.294.4000, on the web at http://www.it.iastate.edu/help/, by email at solution@iastate.edu, or in person at 195 Durham Center.