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Email service on pangea ends on Nov 1, 2007.
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This web page describes how to avoid spam email in the first place, and then manage the spam email that makes it to your @pangea.stanford.edu account. Spam sent to your @stanford.edu account must be managed separately. See the ITS Anti-Spam web page for control of spam to your @stanford.edu account.
If you need instant relief from spam on your @pangea.stanford.edu email account, please go directly to the Email Management application on the pangea account maintenance web server. If you need help using that server, look at the pangea account management web page. Then come back here to read more about how to avoid and manage spam.
Basic precautions you can take to avoid spam
The best way to avoid unsolicited, commercial or fraudulent email, called "spam", is to keep your email address private. Once your email address becomes publicized on the Internet, then there is very little you can do to prevent email spam from being sent to you.
Do not use your Stanford email account to post to public web sites (for example, "Craig's List") or news groups on the Internet, where anyone (including spammers) can read it. Use another address from a free service, such as hotmail.com or yahoo.com, for that purpose. If that free email account starts getting too much spam, you can close it and open a new one.
Do not put your email address on any public web pages, which are regularly searched by automated "harvesting" programs run by spammers. If your email pages are served by pangea, you can link instead to the email form on pangea that allows people to see your @stanford.edu email address and send you email, but hides your address from automated programs (using a javascript).
If you must post your email address on some other public web site that does not have a spam-protecting mail form like pangea, modify it in a way that will make it less visible to automatic harvesting programs. For example, instead of putting "sampleaddress@stanford.edu" on a web page, try putting "sampleaddress on the server stanford.edu", which a person can easily interpret, but a program will probably miss (because it is lacking the @ symbol or the word "at").
Be careful about signing up on web sites - see if they have any privacy policies that govern what they do with your email address.
Do not respond to spam emails. U.S. federal law now requires that unsolicited email spam must tell you how to remove your address from the spammer's list. However, unless the email comes from a well-known company, be suspicious. Responding to the "remove" instructions may only confirm that you use your email account and encourage more spam. You can forward the spam email message to the Federal Trade Commission. They will not respond individually, but they do aggregate spam reports to find the worst offenders to prosecute. Turn on full headers first, and then forward the spam message to spam@uce.gov
More tips on how to avoid spam can be found on the Federal Trade Commission's Information Security - Consumer Information website. Scroll down to the "SPAM" section.
How pangea's spam checker works
Pangea runs the Sophos PureMessage anti-spam email checking program, the same one used by the central @stanford.edu servers. This program uses constantly updated lists of known spammers and heuristic rules for recognizing spam content in order to determine a "spam probability" for each email message received on pangea.
If the spam probability is more than 50%, then the program inserts the keyword [SPAM: at the start of the email message subject line. As the probability of spam increases, hash or pound marks (#) are added after the keyword [SPAM: to a maximum of five marks, which is about 95% or higher probability that the message is spam.
So, for example, a message subject line such as
Subject: Information for your review
may be altered to say
Subject: [SPAM:#] Information for your review
if the probability that this message is spam is just 50%, or
Subject: [SPAM:###] Information for your review
if the spam probability is about 80%, or
Subject: [SPAM:#####] Information for your review
if the spam probability is 95% or greater.
Some legitimate email, particularly mailing lists with fancy HTML coding, is mistakenly marked as likely spam by this program. For that reason, pangea does not automatically delete all messages marked as spam. You must decide how email flagged as SPAM will be treated for your account.
Also, some spam messages will escape detection altogether by the spam checking program. It relies on heuristic rules to recognize spam. The "spammers" try to defeat these rules. For example, some spam is full of odd word misspellings. This is an attempt to defeat spam checking rules that look for words commonly found in spam, such as "viagra". Also, spam in non-English languages is rarely marked by the spam checking program.
You have two options for handling email flagged on pangea as likely spam: let pangea delete the spam; or use a filter in your email program.
Let pangea delete the spam for you
You can use the Spam Deletion feature of the new pangea account maintenance web server to let the pangea server itself either delete these messages or move them to a special email folder. Just follow the directions on that server to select your preference. You can treat "obvious" spam (four or five hash marks) differently from "likely" spam (one to three hash marks).
This is by far the most efficient way to handle spam, because the server deletes or moves it before it ever gets to your email INBOX. Your email program never even sees these messages.
Be aware that if you choose to quarantine spam (move to another folder) rather than just delete it, you have the responsibility to periodically check the SPAM-Quarantine folder that will be created, to look for any legitimate email and delete the rest. In order to make sure that quarantined spam messages don't just fill up the disks on pangea in neglected SPAM-Quarantine folders, the system will automatically erase any message more than 30 days old in those folders.
The default spam deletion setting for new pangea accounts is to delete all obvious spam, but deliver likely spam to the user's INBOX. Accounts created before the spam deletion feature was implemented (before June 2006) are getting all spam messages delivered, and must use the pangea account maintenance web server to change that setting.
Use a spam filter in your own email program
If you do not want pangea to delete or move spam itself, your second option is to use filtering options in your specific email program to either delete messages marked as spam or move them into a separate folder (for example, a folder named "spam").
This is less efficient that spam deletion or quarantine by the server, because the messages are first delivered to your pangea INBOX, and then downloaded and deleted by your email program. Also, if you read email using more than one program or computer, you must configure the filter on each, because each will download the spam emails from your INBOX.
If you do decide to use filters on your email program, rather than spam handling by the server, you must decide how high a spam probability (how many hash marks) the message needs to have to trigger this filtering. For example, I find that emails I receive with three, four or five spam hash marks are always spam. But messages from my credit card company get marked as spam with one or two hash marks. So I would create a filtering rule to automatically delete only those messages marked as spam with three, four or five hash marks.
All email programs, including pine, webmail, Eudora Pro, Outlook, MacOS X Mail, and others, include filtering facilities that you can setup to delete or move messages marked as spam.
The specific commands you need to create these filters and delete the entire contents of the spam folder vary according to the email program you are using.
See these instructions to create a spam filtering rule for the pine email program. Use the ITS Anti-Spam web site to get instructions for common PC and Mac email programs, such as Eudora and MacOS X Mail. Or consult the built-in help for your program.The ITS web site is specifically oriented toward handling spam messages received on the central @stanford.edu mail servers. The same filtering options it describes also work on pangea except the Spam Deletion Tool on the ITS website only applies to spam email received at your @stanford.edu account. You must use pangea's own Spam Deletion feature on the pangea account maintenance web server to delete spam received at your @pangea.stanford.edu account.
