[Calendar] SPAM false positives/negatives and WebEvent calendar email

[Alan Bridle]

Gareth, Chris, Pat, David

Here's something to think about when you are finished
with the all-sites sysadmin meeting later this week.

We have begun to get false SPAM positives and also actual
spam unflagged in the email to calendar at nrao.edu, which
is the administrative mailing list used by the WebEvent
reservation system.  Both of these conditions look set
to become a time-wasting complication for the already-
busy reservationists at all NRAO sites.  Can C&IS come
up with a fix?

1. False SPAM positives

When WebEvent users use the "Add Event" button to
submit an event reservation request to WebEvent, the
WebEvent program sends a transaction log as an email to
calendar at nrao.edu.  These logs are in an odd format,
basically a scripting entry for the WebEvent database,
but they are somewhat human-readable.  The spam filter
has recently started to flag them as {SPAM?} however.
Obviously we would like that not to occur.  Is it possible
to tell the filter not to flag any email from WebEvent
(nraocal at nrao.edu) to calendar at nrao.edu as spam?

2. Unflagged actual SPAM

The other side of the coin is that some actual spam
is now being sent to calendar at nrao.edu and is NOT
being flagged as spam.  It's all coming from addresses
outside the NRAO.  Is there a way to block all mail from
non-NRAO addresses from reaching calendar at nrao.edu?
(I've asked Gareth this before and I believe he said
it was not trivial to implement).  However, the volume
of spam traffic to calendar at nrao.edu is slowly increasing
so we will soon need to do something to prevent spam from
clogging up our internal message archive.

Thanks in advance,

Alan B.