CITES Spam Control is a service that reduces the amount of spam you receive and eliminates known viruses before they reach your mailbox.

Is it real email, spam, or a virus?

CITES Spam Control uses a scoring system to determine if an incoming email sent to netid@uiuc.edu or netid@illinois.edu is legitimate email, spam, or virus-infected. Depending on its score, the email is regarded as one of the following:

• Not Spam: The email is legitimate correspondence.
• Possible Spam: The email has questionable characteristics but could be legitimate.
• Likely Spam: The email is probably spam.
• Certain Spam: The email is definitely spam.
• Virus: The email contains a known virus.

You can find detailed information about how email messages are evaluated on the CITES Spam Control Scoring System page.

Choosing how your spam is handled

You can choose one of five different ways for CITES Spam Control to handle possible, likely and certain spam. (Messages containing viruses are immediately deleted, and legitimate email messages [Not Spam] are delivered to your mailbox, regardless of which preference you select.)

The five ways for handling likely and certain spam are referred to as Personal Spam Policies. They are:

• Tag and Deliver: All email is scored and delivered to your mailbox. Note: Email from servers that are being actively blocked by CITES (due to a very high probability that they send spam) do not arrive at our campus and therefore cannot be delivered. See the Adapting to emerging spam threats section below.
• Cautious: Possible, likely and certain spam is sent to your Quarantine, a server space where spam is held for 10 days.
• Cautious Plus: Possible and likely spam is sent to your Quarantine, certain spam is automatically deleted.
• Aggressive: Possible spam is sent to your Quarantine; likely and certain spam is automatically deleted.
• No Quarantine: Possible spam is delivered to your mailbox; likely and certain spam is automatically deleted.
• Cautious Plus, No Quarantine: Possible and likely spam is delivered to your mailbox; certain and known spam is automatically deleted.

The following chart illustrates the differences in the policies:

 

	Personal Spam Policies
	Tag and Deliver	Cautious	Cautious Plus	Aggressive	No Quarantine	Cautious Plus, No Quarantine
Not Spam	delivered	delivered	delivered	delivered	delivered	delivered
Possible Spam	delivered	quarantined	quarantined	quarantined	delivered	delivered
Likely Spam	delivered	quarantined	quarantined	deleted	deleted	delivered
Certain Spam	delivered	quarantined	deleted	deleted	deleted	deleted
Known Virus	deleted	deleted	deleted	deleted	deleted	deleted

 

The Cautious Plus policy is the default for existing students. New students, as of Fall 2010, will be defaulted into Cautious Plus, No Quarantine. Everyone else is in the Tag and Deliver policy by default. You can change which policy you are using at any time. See Selecting Your Personal Spam Policy for instructions.

For help deciding which policy is best for you, see the CITES Spam Control Scenarios pages.

Safeguarding your email

Over the past several years, Spam Control has proven to be very reliable at correctly distinguishing spam from real email. However, an occassional mistake might occur--spam might slip through the filters or conversely, an email from your friend could get caught. Spam Control has additional safeguards if you are concerned that your legitimate email messages might be mistaken for spam.

The Quarantine and Daily Digests

Some policies use a separate storage space called the Quarantine to hold email marked as spam so that they do not take up space in your email account. If you choose a policy that quarantines spam, please be aware that emails in the Quarantine for more than 10 days will be automatically deleted.

You can view the contents of your Quarantine through daily email digests, which will list all emails added in the past 24 hours. You can choose to release an email if you want to make sure it is not legitimate email. It is recommended that you review the list every day to make sure there are not any legitimate emails in your Quarantine.

Safe and Blocked Senders Lists

You can add your correspondents' email addresses to your Safe Senders list, which will prevent them from being marked as spam. Similarly, you can add unwanted email addresses to your Blocked Senders list.

CITES also maintains a Global Safe List. This allows official University communication to go through CITES Spam Control to users' mailboxes.

Note: Because of the way Spam Control handles messages from campus email addresses, adding uiuc.edu and illinois.edu email addresses (or the domain uiuc.edu and illinois.edu) to the Safe or Blocked Senders list has no effect. CITES has reported this issue to the software's vendor.

Adapting to emerging spam threats

CITES receives constant updates from Spam Control's software vendor on global emerging spam threats, allowing us to quickly and accurately identify the worst spam servers. Using a practice known as connection blocking, CITES restricts these servers' communication with our campus mail server, making it less likely that spam can end up in your mailbox.

Signing up

For instructions on signing up for CITES Spam Control, see Getting Started.