What is UWA doing about Spam?

UWA is aware of the increase in spam and the subsequent frustration that people are experiencing.

Real-time Block List (RBL) Rejection

From July 2008, in an effort to reduce the amount of SPAM the University is now rejecting emails from known SPAM servers (black-listed sites) throughout the world. At the time of implementation of this policy, an 80% reduction in the amount of email being accepted by the central email servers had been noted.

If a genuine sender has been black-listed, they will receive the following rejection message when they try to send any emails to the University:

  554 5.7.1 Your e-mail has been rejected by the University of Western Australia
  because your IP address appears on a SPAM black-list. Please forward the 
  following message to your Service Provider to resolve this issue:   
  hostname[xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx] blocked using zen.spamhaus.org.   Please see 
  http://www.spamhaus.org/query/bl?ip=xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
  

If a genuine sender contacts you regarding a rejected email message, please advise the sender to contact their Service Provider, such as their IT department, and pass on the information contained in the email rejection message.

[SPAM] Tagging

UWA uses a commercial anti-spam filtering tool that scans emails and can automatically identify emails that are likely to be spam as they move through the University email systems. The software marks suspected emails as spam by adding the [SPAM] tag to the subject of a message to allow them to be automatically refiled into junk email folders.

As it is possible for a legitimate message to be incorrectly recognised as spam (false positives), email will only be tagged [SPAM] and not deleted from the central server.  If you receive legitimate emails tagged as [SPAM] please send the Full Headers of the affected email to the ITS Service Desk for investigation.