Your U-Mail Account employs state-of-the-art filtering technology to detect and quarantine unsolicited bulk e-mail (also known as "spam"). The filtering system heuristically scans each message received, detects potential spam content, and assigns the message a spam "score" based on what was detected. If this spam score exceeds a customizable threshold value, the message is marked as spam.

When a message is marked as spam, "[SPAM]" is added to the subject and the message is delivered into a special "junk-mail" mailbox. If you prefer, you can have spam delivered into your inbox or deleted upon arrival. Any message in your junk-mail mailbox that's older than 30 days is automatically deleted.

The spam filtering system is not fool-proof, and there will occasionally be false-positives (messages that are not spam which have been incorrectly tagged). To prevent university-related messages from being marked as spam, the system will bypass any address ending in "ucsb.edu". However, we recommend that you review any spam-marked messages before deleting them.

The filtering system is highly configurable to suit personal spam tolerance levels and desired spam reporting methods. Customization of your spam filtering preferences is handled through the WebAccess Spam Filtering tool in the Account Tools section. From the spam filtering you can decide where you want spam-tagged messages to be delivered, specify addresses never to be tagged as spam, as well as raise or lower your "spam threshold".

Contact the Help Desk if you have any questions about the spam filtering service.