PMAS

Before using this anti-spam filter, you need to be aware of what it does. Therefore, it is not enabled for your Waisman e-mail unless you specifically opt-in to use it. Please be aware of these five points:

• No anti-spam product is going to catch every spam message.
• When you first begin to use an anti-spam product, there will be messages that you want to receive that are mistaken for spam. These are known as false positives.
• If you communicate by email with an outside organization that sends you important messages (e.g. a granting agency), you must put their address in your list of allowed senders to guarantee you see their messages. Only if the organization is small should you consider adding it's entire domain (all addreses) to your allow list.
• Just because a message is from another Waisman or campus email address does not guarantee it will avoid spam checking and possibly end up in your quarantine. Some senders may choose to use off campus mail systems such as yahoo, gmail, etc. but the message appears to be from a waisman or campus address because they set their return address to that address. In this case the message actually comes from an outside provider and will be checked for spam which means it could end up in your quarantine.
• Do not be tempted to add your own address to your allow list. Doing so will guarantee you'll get lot's of spam. Remember, spam nearly always has a forged from or return path address and very often it is your own address. Also use caution when adding entire domains to your allow list. Adding *@wisc.edu would be a bad idea and would cripple the effectiveness of the spam filter.

You can of course instruct PreciseMail that a message it has flagged as spam is really not spam and you wish to have future messages from this sender not treated as spam. Eventually, you will have a list of senders who's messages should not be flagged as spam and the number of false positives will be very low. False positives are typically newsletters or other messages from organizations (vendors, groups, etc.) you receive on a periodic basis that contain a links to web pages or marketing terms.

We already have a list of senders that will not be checked for spam because we know email from them is of general interest to many people at the center. These include email from any campus mail system, The State of Wisconsin, Community of Science and popular vendors (Dell, Orbitz and most major airlines). You can suggest additional senders be added to this center wide list of allowed senders when using PreciseMail.

Please keep in mind that the sender's From: address has absolutely nothing to do with where the message actually originates from. Spammer's take advantage of this to make you think a message came from someone on campus. This also means that mail from a sender with a campus address doesn't always mean it came from a campus email system if the sender has chosen to use an outside email provider such as yahoo or gmail. Such messages will be checked for spam an could end up in your quarantine.

Those are the basics. You really should know a bit about how it works before you opt-in to use it. Each person has a "quarantine" where messages that are likely to be spam will be kept for 28 days. This means when a message is received that gets flagged as spam, you won't receive it as an e-mail - it will be in the quarantine for 28 days instead. You have 28 days to view and/or release it from the quarantine or it gets discarded. So you will need to view the messages in the quarantine to see if there are any you really want - false positives. When first starting to use PreciseMail, you'll want to look in the quarantine often to make a message you really wanted wasn't marked as spam. After you tell PreciseMail a quarantined message is not really spam, it won't bother to check future messages from that sender. Soon, you will have a good list of allowed senders and won't need to check the quarantine at all except when you don't receive a message you were expecting.