Our spam filtering relies partly on a bayesian filter, which requires constant training to keep up with the ever changing tactics of spammers. You can help us by sending a complete copy of your spam emails to nospam@cs.utexas.edu. Please note, this must be a *complete* copy of the email, including all headers. The easiest and best way to send the mail is to use your mail client's ability to "Forward as an Attachment".
Mailing lists, for the most part, are only created for "official" department purposes (lists of students in a class created for TAs, etc). These are the steps to take to create one:
New UT Austin employees starting on or after 12/11/18 will have an @austin.utexas.edu email address created for them automatically by ITS. This mailbox is discoverable via UT's Exchange directory, so you may be receiving email there and not know about it. This can be problematic for obvious reasons. Follow these steps to remove that address from the Exchange directory, and forward the email.
You have several options:
There's not really a way to opt out of using the spam filter, but users do have the ability to tune how aggressively the filter behaves on mail sent to you. In your user directory, there is a hidden directory named .spamassassin, and Inside of that is a text file called user_prefs (there are other files too, but you should leave those alone). Using a text editor, you can add one of the following lines to the end of the file:
All mail forwarding on the CS system is handled by a central user account database; .forward files won't work. To get mail forwarded, email help@cs.utexas.edu from your UTCS email account and make the request. UTCS email is never forwarded past the lifetime of an account. UT offers alumni email here. If you want to learn more about how to use procmail on our systems, check out the FAQ on procmail.
The newer SMTP server (mail2.cs.utexas.edu) no longer requires a separate SMTP email password, so you will simply use your standard CS account password. See our Email Configuration page for more details
The CS department install of procmail which filters your mail upon delivery is specially configured for our environment. It is set up as usual via your ~/.procmailrc file, but with two caveats:
Use the 'vacation' program. You can read the vacation(1) man pages for usage info, but the quick-start method is to create a message you'd like to send in response to emails you receive and save it as ~/.vacation.msg, and then run vacation -i. To turn this off, simply remove ~/.vacation.msg.
The POP/IMAP servers and some mail reader software (anything that uses the c-client library) use this "dummy" message to maintain state over time. Because our POP/IMAP server recognizes this message as containing metadata, it doesn't send it to POP/IMAP clients, such as Apple Mail or Thunderbird, so you'll normally never see it. But if you use an email client that doesn't recognize this as a "special" message, it will show it to you as a regular message.