CITES Spam Control Scoring System

This page describes how Spam Control identifies and tags spam.

How email messages are tagged

CITES Spam Control uses a statistical model--based on thousands of attributes such as language in the subject and body, the origination of the message, and information in the message's headers--to evaluate each message sent to netID@uiuc.edu. Depending on its attributes, each message is "tagged" with a number from 0 to 100. The higher the number, the more likely the message is spam. You can see the tagged score by viewing the full headers of your email message.

Spammers constantly change how they send spam in order to deceive anti-spam programs. Spam Control updates its scoring attributes every day so that it can keep pace with emerging spam threats.

Note: 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. Because these spam messages are blocked before they are even sent, they are not scored and processed by Spam Control.

Handling tagged email messages

Your Personal Spam Policy is comprised of your chosen spam management options (for more information, see Overview of Spam Control). You can choose a Personal Spam Policy that will automatically set the threshold for a message to be regarded as spam. The Cautious, Cautious Plus, Aggressive, and No Quarantine policies use the following thresholds:

Score Regarded as Definition
0 to 49 Not Spam The email is legitimate correspondence
50 to 79 Possible Spam The email has questionable characteristics but could be legitimate.
80 to 98 Likely Spam The email is probably spam.
99 and 100 Certain Spam The email is definitely spam.

 

The Cautious, Cautious Plus, Aggressive, and No Quarantine polices will either quarantine or delete spam automatically for you (for more information, see Overview of Spam Control). If you would rather set your own thresholds, you can use the Tag and Deliver policy and set up filters in your email client. For example, you could have any email with a score of 25 or more be sent to your Trash folder.

Note: You can also use your own filters in tandem with the other policies.