Creating a Spam Filter Rule in Macintosh Entourage

ITS has implemented a new way of marking spam messages. Potential spam or junk mail messages are flagged in the subject line of each message as POTENTIAL SPAM. This allows UCB e-mail users to filter spam and junk mail messages away from their inbox. For more information about ITS's effort against spam go to www.colorado.edu/its/email/spam.html

Creating a Spam Filter

You may first wish to create a folder to place your spam. To do so, open your Entourage e-mail program and follow these instructions:

1. Click on the File drop-down menu.

2. Go to New and select Subfolder.

3. This will create a new folder in your account directory.

4. Change the name of this folder from untitled folder to Spam.

The folder that has just been created will hold all of the spam that the ITS content anaylsis system filters. To create the spam filter, follow the instructions below.

To set up a filter:

1. Go to the Tools drop down menu and select Rules.

2. On the window that appears, click on the New button. A window like this will appear:

3. Change the Rule Name to Spam.

4. In the If box, change the first pull down menu to Subject, change the second menu to Contains, and type in the words POTENTIAL SPAM.

5. In the Then box, use the first pull down menu to select Move Message, use the second pull down menu to select Choose Folder....Navigate to the Spam folder you have created or chosen. Once your rule is set up, like in the window below, click OK.

Entourage will now automatically move all mail that CU's mail filter thinks is spam into the folder called Spam and not into your Inbox. It is reccomended that you ocassionally peruse and trash the contents of the Spam folder to make sure there are no false positives (messages marked as spam, but are not) and to save disk space.

For more information about spam go to www.colorado.edu/its/email/spam.html