Imperial College London receives 750,000 emails a day. 450,000 are spam. College's filtering service checks all incoming email to College accounts from outside our network, to filter out known junk mail or malicious emails.

Our systems block many incoming emails but cannot block all of them. To catch those that get through our net, you need to be able to spot the signs of a scam email and report it to the ICT Security team via the ICT Service Desk.

What happens to spam?

When messages are detected as spam, they are not delivered and are quarantined in your individual spam quarantine section, held on a central server. The server will keep the message for seven days, before automatically deleting it.

Spam quarantine

If an email sent to you has been marked as spam, you, as the intended recipient, will receive a notification email every weekday to let you know there are messages intended for you in quarantine. You can respond to the notification and release a message from quarantine at any time before it is automatically deleted, or you can visit the SPAM quarantine website, choose Review Blocked Email from the main menu and Release the selected email yourself.

Assign a delegate to manage your spam

You can assign a delegate to manage your spam by following these steps:

1. Login to the SPAM quarantine website.
2. Select Let another user view my blocked mail from the main menu.
3. Enter the username of the person you wish to assign in the form IC\username e.g. IC\jbloggs.

When your delegate logs in to the website he or she will be able to choose the email account to review from the Review Blocked Email webpage.

Spam quarantine for group mailing lists

If you would like to make use of spam quarantine for a group mailing list of which you are the owner, contact the ICT Service Desk.