Creating a Spam filter in SquirrelMail

It is possible to set up spam filters in Squirrelmail that will take effect regardless of the e-mail client you normally use. The University e-mail servers are configured to give nearly every e-mail that comes through our servers a spam score. If that score reaches a certain threshold, the server will automatically set an email header (the parts of the email that includes "To", "From" and "Subject" but not always completely displayed) called "X-Spam-Warning" to "Yes". This does not, in and of itself, make any changes as to whether you will receive the e-mail. And certainly not all Spam is correctly identified as such. For more information on how the spam score is determined, click here. In the example below, the Unbeleivable deals for medication e-mail is correctly identified as Spam.

Creating the Spam Filter
Now to create the filter, click on the Filters link on the top menu to set up the spam filter. If you have never set up a filter before you will see a message to that effect or the image that appears below. If you have set up a filter, you will see the information on that filter along with the button to Add a New Rule. In either case, click on this button to set up a new filter.

It will begin by asking what conditions you want the filter to check. You will be selecting a series of conditions that, if met, will cause something to happen with the e-mail in question. In most cases (including for this Spam filter) you will want to select Header Match for the first drop menu (in red).

The second drop menu lists the email header to check. For a spam filter, you will want to select the "X-Barracuda-Spam-Status" as the first email header to match (in blue) and enter Yes in the box just below it, as illustrated above.

You will then have several options of what action to take with the emails matching the conditions set above. In this case we are going to move the spam into that special Spam folder that we have set up for it. This will allow us to have a special folder that we can look at once in awhile to see if anything we actually wanted accidentally got tossed in there, and if not, simply delete all the messages in that folder. To do this simply click Move Message into, the existing folder and select Spam from the pull-down menu.

At the bottom , you can select additional actions to take or tell the filter software not to do anything further with the email. Here you should generally tell the filter to stop checking the message to see if it matches other rules.

Messages which are placed into the Spam folder (INBOX.Spam) will be purged automatically after they've been there for 14 days.

If you are interested in customizing your filtering more, you can make use of the "X-Spam-Score" header which is inserted into many emails which didn't quite reach the threshold to mark with the X-Spam-Warning as "Yes". If you elect to try this, be careful that as ITS updates the spam scoring software, it could greatly affect what your X-Spam-Score filter catches, causing your filter to filter emails it wouldn't have prior to the update.

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