handling of wrongly marked emails

The spam filter of the University marks emails with a so called "spam score" or "spam level". The spam score is an indicator for how likely an email is spam and therefore of undesired nature.

The classification is done partly based on manually created rules and partly based on machine learning (bayes filters).

Like all such procedures spam recognition is somewhat flawed. Meaning, it is possible to get incorrect classifications.

Two different kinds of errors can be distinguished

  • Error of 1st kind (false positive) desired emails that have been recognized as spam erroneously
  • Error of 2nd kind (false negative) undesired E-Mails, that are not being regognized as spam
 
Of course we want to at least avoid both these errors in the future. However, for this purpose we will need your support.

 

an undesired email has not been marked as spam

In this case, please send the respective email as an attchment to spamreport@rz.uni-kiel.de.

Please avoid, if at all possible, the option "block sender" in your email client. The senders of spam emails are usually spoofed.

Almost all problems known to us regarding emails wrongfully moved to the spam folder can be traced back to a sender block list.

a desired email has been marked as spam

There two different scenarios to consider:

  • Desired emails are being marked with "spam hits" in the subject line.

In this case please send the respective emaul as an attachment to hamreport@rz.uni-kiel.de.

  • Desired emails are being filtered out to a spam- or junk folder.

Please check the spam filter settings of your email client first. If availalable you might have to adjust the sensitivity of your  personal spam filter rule set

notes

  • Under no circumstances should you send emails containing personal or confidential information to either spamreport@rz.uni-kiel.de or hamreprt@rz.uni.kiel.de. Emails arriving at the addresses might be used for the training of the central spam filter whicht would lead to the storage of above-mentioned information.
    Please contact the service privder in charge should an email containing personal or confidential information be wrongfully recognized as spam.
  • Please only send emails as an attachment to the above-mentioned addresses. Forwarded emails simply via the "forward" function are unfortunately useless for evaluation.