The VMS server is configured to throw away mail that it recognizes as having been generated by worms/viruses. The SLAC mail gateway strips executable attachments, so that such mail is usually harmless by the time it reaches the SSRL VMS server, but it would still fill up your mailbox.

If you read mail on VMS, you can use server based mail filtering to get rid of SPAM before it ever hits your mailbox.

There's an easy web-based interface to SSRL mail filters. (There's also a text-based programming language for very sophisticated filtering, but the web-based interface will do a lot for you. If you want to learn about the Sieve programming language, here's a link.

Now, a brief introduction to web-based filtering:
Point your web browser (works best with IE, unfortunately) to

http://ssrl.slac.stanford.edu:7633

Click on "Mailbox filters and vacation notices"

That brings up a new menu with

Accept Filters
Discard Filters

On Discard Filters, click on "Subject"

(Somewhere in here it'll ask for username and password; this needs to be your VMS username and password, not Windows.)

SLAC's spam identifier marks subject lines with SPAM: followed by some number of "#"s based on their confidence level that the thing is spam. In my experience, anything with SPAM:#### or SPAM:##### really is spam, but some SPAM:### and most SPAM:## and SPAM:# are legit, so I wouldn't want to filter them out myself. Your mail load may well be different, which is why we can't make this decision on a system-wide or site-wide basis.

You get to choose what level you want to block. (This risk of false positives and losing email you want is why SLAC just labels and doesn't block incoming SPAM.)

Whatever you've decided as the minimum spam level you want to block, type that in, click ADD, click SUBMIT, and you should have spam filtering henceforward.

It's a really good idea to send yourself some email at this point and see whether it gets through, in case you've accidentally blocked more than you meant to. You're probably safe with subject-line filtering, but if you start filtering based on message body contents, it's easy to block more than you mean to.

For more info and detail on the web-based filtering interface, see the PMDF user's guide, chapter 8