Mail Anti-Spam and Anti-Virus   Anti-spam What is spam and who are spammers?

Spam is a huge problem for anyone who gets Email

The word "Spam" as applied to Email means Unsolicited Bulk Email. Unsolicited means that the Recipient has not granted verifiable permission for the message to be sent. Bulk means that the message is sent as part of a larger collection of messages, all having substantively identical content. A message is Spam only if it is both Unsolicited and Bulk.

If you send or receive Email, you probably get a lot of junk Email, also known as spam. Spam is a profitable business for the senders: it's cheap to send out millions, even billions, of Email messages, even if a small percentage of a hundred million people buy something in response to a spam Email message.

• Via newsgroups and chat rooms, especially on big sites.
• Via the Web itself. There are tens of millions of Web sites containing Email addresses, which are scanned by spammers.
• Via sites created specifically to attract Email addresses. These sites encourage users to sign-up, and collect their Email addresses.
• The most common source of Email addresses, however, is a "dictionary" search of the Email servers of large Email hosting companies.

The University's Spam Filter

The University uses an anti-spam filter at the server level, eliminating the need to install and update anti-spam software on each desktop.

If you do not receive an expected message, it may be found in our quarantine. We save quarantined messages suspected as spam for one week. If you don’t receive messages that you were expecting, please contact Juliana Solomon: juli@cc.huji.ac.il

Filtering Outgoing Mail

The University checks for spam in outgoing mail as well as incoming mail. Below are a few tips to follow so that your mail will not be suspected of being spam.

• Do not send your message to too many recipients. Please limit the number of recipients to under 20.
  
• If you send your mail via Webmail, you will not be able to send a message from an address which is not @..huji.ac.il.
• Always logout properly when you are working with web interface (webmail, HUJImail, etc.) - Always click the logout button or link before closing your browser's window
• Do not use colors or decorations in your message
  
• The clock on your computer should be set to the correct time. Messages sent from unsynchronized computers are regarded as suspicious. If you have trouble setting your clock to summer time, please see Setting daylight savings time.

Anti-virus

All mail that reaches our mail gateway checks for viruses. Once a virus is detected, the attachment is discarded and the rest of the message is sent to the recipient with a new attachment that contains a message from the mail gateway antivirus.

Extensions: Attachments that end with the following extensions : .exe, .rar, .pif, .vbs, .scr, .cmd, .bat
are blocked by many email clients. If you wish to send a file with the listed extension, zip it first and, only then, send it.

Outmail: You need to set our mail gateway in order to scan your outgoing messages for viruses. Set your outgoing mail (SMTP) to outmail.huji.ac.il according to our instruction: http://ca.huji.ac.il/services/internet/mail/outmail/