Everyone gets spam, and everyone hates it. We have installed spamassassin in the department, which is software that attempts to identify spam messages. You can then use another mail filtering program like procmail to filter the messages out of your mailbox.
See http://www.cs.umd.edu/faq/spam for complete setup instructions.
Please note that it is important to be extra careful with any software that manipulates your Email, because if it is improperly set up you could easily and permanently lose important email. If you have questions or problems, please let us know.
WARNING: we have noticed that spamassasssin running on the mail scanners (linux) and spamassassin running on junkfood.cs.umd.edu are not compatible if you are using the bayes database for filtering. This won't result in lost mail, but it will prevent that feature from filtering out spam. If you choose to run spamassassin, be sure to run any related commands like sa-learn on a department linux machine.
Also note that we are not automatically filtering out spam for everyone because of the potential for accidentally discarding legitimate email. If you choose to use this software, you are expected to take the time to understand how it works and accept responsibility for whatever it does to your email. We can help you minimize the risk, but the choice and responsibility is ultimately yours.