Spam is any unwanted bulk email - it can be an advertisement, an attempt to spread a virus or an attempt to gain access to your personal information. It can even be email from a legitimate site as a result of someone spoofing your email address. For more details, please see the UBC ITService Catelogue Email Security and Dealing With Phishing web pages.
PHAS Mail Server
Mail addressed to any of our mail domains is first directed to the UBC Mail Relays for spam and virus detection. The sanitized messages are sent to our incoming mail server, mail.phas.ubc.ca, for storage on disk & delivery to the users' inboxes.
The PHAS server uses the dovecot "deliver" program as the LDA (Local Delivery Agent). This means that any user-defined sieve filters will be applied before the delivery to the inbox. You can customize the sieve filters - see the local sieve page for details.
Mail Client Filtering
Most mail clients include tools for filtering your incoming messages. The filtering system can be "taught" to detect junk email - for example, Mozilla Thunderbird's junk mail tool.
You can often unsubscribe from unwanted email lists - just use your common sense when following the unsubscribe instructions.
How to forward email spam and false-positive spam samples to UBC mail filters
It is preferred that you send samples as RFC-2822 attachments. Submitting in any other format can cause the loss of key message content which is needed to effectively analyze the samples.
Email spam samples to : is-spam-AT-ubc.ca
Email false-positive spam samples to :not-spam-AT-ubc.ca
NOTE: Be sure to strip out any and all personally identifiable information (PII) from the email before forwarding it!
PII is defined by the University Counsel as “recorded information about an identifiable individual other than contact information.”
Contact information refers to the business telephone number, address, and/or email of all UBC employees, faculty members, volunteers, and service providers, but not of its students. Further details on what is considered PII can be found in the Privacy Fact Sheet.
What to do
From Microsoft Outlook
- Create a new email message.
- Address it to one of the above UBC mail filter addresses.
- From your Inbox, select the spam email that you received - you must select the email, not the content.
- Drag and drop the selected item(s) into the new email.
- This will now show as an empty email with the suspect email as an attachment.
- Send the email to the UBC mail filters at the address you selected above.
From Mozilla Thunderbird
- Select the sample.
- From the toolbar choose Message > Forward > Attachment.
- Address it to one of the above UBC mail filter addresses.
- Send the email.
From other email clients
With other email client use the option 'Forward As Attachment'. You should discuss this with Sophos Technical Support before sending in a sample in this way.
Further information
Spam samples sent to one of the above Sophos addresses as RFC-2822 attachments will be automatically processed by systems within SophosLabs.
- You will not receive feedback for emails messages sent to these addresses.
- Samples sent to these addresses will not necessarily be considered to be, or detected as, spam.
If you believe that an item should be detected, raise the matter with Sophos Technical Support.
If you wish to submit spam samples to support, attach the entire message source.