Spam is the name given to unwanted e-mail messages, sent usually for commercial purposes.

The ICTP mail server tries to detect spam by checking external databases of IP addresses and known spam signatures. It then adds a few lines to the header of the e-mail indicating of how likely it is to be spam. If the message header contains the line:

you can be practically sure that it is spam.

These header lines are usually not displayed by the mail programs but you can configure them to apply some special action to messages matching this pattern, like moving them to a separate folder.

Important: The system is not 100% fail-safe. Occasionally a regular message might end up classified as spam. Therefore you will have to browse through the spam filter in regular intervals, make sure that it only containts spam and empty it then.

Instructions for

• Pine
• Web mail
• Outlook
• Eudora
• Mail in OS X

Important: If you have been using the previous system (pre November 2003) to filter spam which involved the use of .procmailrc, please de-install it by either removing the file:

completely or at least removing the last line from it looking like this:

Do this in any case, even if you do not intend to use the new spam filtering feature. The old system is not working anymore.