Number of spam email has recently increased tremendously. My university email address has been clean from spam for years. Only six months ago this dream of Sleeping Beauty was disturbed. My email account started to receive spam. I called faculty IT department for help, but got a hopeless answer. Their spam filtering system cannot prevent my inbox from certain new messages which turned to be spam after all. This new kind of message contains an image that is easily passed through the tight filtering and so filling up my inbox with trifling messages.

Thanks to the university mail account management and excellent Sieve mail filtering language, I can effectively filter out unwanted messages. Actually the filtering language is very powerful but the management console makes handling rules lot easier with its easy interface. Setting up a rule to filter out specific messages is a snap. With the following steps you can start checking all incoming messages and move suspected mail into the Junk folder. Note that you must first create the Junk folder with your email client in case you don’t already have one. Alternatively you can move filtered mail directly into the Trash folder.

1. Login the university Mail Account Management using your usual username and password.
2. Click Add Rule link.
3. Enter X-HY-Spam-Status in Field name field.
4. Enter HIGH in contains field.
5. Select File Into option.
6. Select Mail Folder for storing suspected spam messages, for example INBOX.Junk.
7. Finally, click Save Rule button.

This rule checks message header field named X-HY-Spam-Status. If the field contains word HIGH the message is filed in the Junk folder. You may create more rules by clicking the Add Rule link or modify existing rules by clicking View/Edit Rules link. Another powerful rule would check X-HY-Spam-Level header field for "*" character. Repeat the steps above and enter X-HY-Spam-Level in the Field name field and "*" character in contains field. Many spammers use Microsoft Outlook Express email client or corresponding mailing component. You can filter out such incoming messages by checking X-MimeOLE field containing phrase Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE or X-Mailer field containing words Microsoft Outlook Express. Don’t forget to empty your Junk folder time to time unless you create a script that automatically purges the folder.