Frequently Asked Questions
Q: Messages I send to people at Cornell are getting marked as spam. How can I stop this from happening?
A: PureMessage checks for a few hundred spam "clues," so if your newsletter or other message is being labeled as spam, you may be able to change your format slightly to avoid this problem. See our Identifying Probable Spam page for more information.
Another possibility is that your host or domain has been reported for sending spam, and has been added to a list of bad actors (known as an RBL - Realtime Blackhole List). Sometimes this happens in error, but this tends to be self-correcting, as these "blacklists" are frequently updated, and the oldest entries removed. If you think this may be the problem (for example, if messages you send to several different places is being rejected or not delivered), you should contact your ISP (Internet service provider) for help.
If an email newsletter or other mailing needed by several people is being mistakenly labeled as spam, please write to the CIT's email system administrators, virus-spam-mgr@cornell.edu, to request that the filters on the central mail servers be modified to accommodate your needs. (This is called "whitelisting" - the opposite of "blacklisting.")
Also see this general information about possible reasons why messages are rejected as spam.
Q: Why can't CIT just delete spam, instead of making everyone set up filters or delete spam messages one by one?
A:We do -- we automatically delete any message with a spam probability over 80%. Below that threshold, we deliver the messages. This is an issue we discussed with many of our campus partners, and the consensus was for us to err on the side of caution. We'd rather deliver a few messages that really are spam, than delete messages that weren't.
Q: Will all Cornell email be screened by PureMessage?
A: Any messages sent to an address that ends in @cornell.edu are screened by by PureMessage. If you are using CIT's email (postoffice) service or Cmail, or if you are an alumnus/a using Cornell's email forwarding service, PureMessage is checking your messages.
If your address ends differently (for example, with @something.cornell.edu), your department or college is routing your email (instead of CIT) and may or may not be filtering spam or virus-infected messages. Your local technical support professional can tell you.
Q: Does this mean CIT is reading my email?
A: No. The filtering tool, PureMessage, enables CIT to continue its policy of not routinely monitoring an individual's communications. The tool can also be tailored to meet the community's needs.
Cornell's policy on Responsible Use of Electronic Communications supports spam filtering or blocking as an appropriate restriction on the university's network, in accordance with university policy prohibitions against harassment. However, given Cornell's commitments to freedom with responsibility and to free inquiry, the decision to begin spam and virus filtering was made with great care.
Q: What else can I do to deal with spam and viruses?
A: For spam, set up filters in your email program to automatically delete messages that PureMessage suspects are spam, or to set these messages aside in a separate folder from your regular email so that you can decide whether they really are spam. See the links in the bar on the left for instructions on how to do this in Eudora, Thunderbird, and Outlook.
To ward off viruses, keep Norton AntiVirus running all the time and update it at least once a week. Although most viruses and worms travel by email, about a fifth of them arrive by other routes, such as file sharing and infected web sites. PureMessage filtering can do nothing to protect against these; up-to-date antivirus software is the best defense.