Did you know that you can set up spam filters and enable vacation scripts using the My Andrew web system? Spam filters will keep your inbox free of unimportant and unsolicited e-mail, and vacation scripts will send an automatic reply to everyone who e-mails you while you are out of town and away from your computer for long periods of time. Both might be useful features for Carnegie Mellon students who will be away for these summer months.

To turn on spam filtering, you must first create a mailbox in your Cyrus account to hold all the e-mail caught by the filter. For a reminder on how to create mailboxes, visit https://www.cmu.edu/computing/ documentation/spam/spamfilter.html and follow the instructions for your mail client (Mulberry, Pine, Outlook, etc). Once you’ve created an “INBOX.spam” mailbox, log into the My Andrew web portal and in the left-hand tool bar, under “E-mail Options,” click on “Mail Filtering and Vacation.” From there, check the “Enable Spam Filtering” box and save your settings. The filter will now redirect all mail marked with a SpamAssassin flag to your Spam mailbox. The Web Portal also offers you a couple of spam options: you can tailor an “Accept” list to accept all mail from domain names you specify, and you can tailor a “Filter” list to reject all mail from domain names you specify.

While you’re at the My Andrew “Mail Filtering and Vacation” page, you can also set up a vacation script, an automated reply that will be sent to anyone who e-mails you while you are away. Simply check the “Enable Vacation Script” box and save your settings. Under the “Vacation Options” link, you can customize your settings: write your own response message, change the reply interval (the length of time the script will wait to resend itself to someone who had already received your vacation message), and add e-mail addresses that might also receive mail from your Andrew account. Since the vacation script will be the reply to all of your incoming e-mail, it is recommended that you remove yourself from any mailing lists before you leave for vacation, so that everyone on the list does not receive your vacation response.