Mail Delivery and Your Email Address
As a Carnegie Mellon affiliate, you are assigned an e-mail address. To be sure that your e-mail is delivered properly, you should
use the e-mail address that has been assigned to you.
The Cyrus mail system uses the following rules as it attempts to deliver e-mail:
- An exact match to the e-mail address that was assigned to you (or to a CMUname that you established).
- Example: Jennifer Adams is assigned the e-mail address "jadams@cmu.edu" and e-mail is sent to "jadams@cmu.edu". The "jadams@cmu.edu" address is the first that the mail system will search for; the system makes an exact match.
- An exact match to common name.
- Example: If the e-mail is addressed to "jennifer.adams@cmu.edu" the Cyrus mail system would more than likely be successful in matching to "Jennifer Adams" since the e-mail address is an exact match to her first and last name. However, problems are encountered when two campus affiliates hold the name "Jennifer Adams".
Fuzzy Matching and E-mail Spam
Fuzzy matching follows a very loose set of phonetic rules in an attempt to match an e-mail address to a common name. For example, an e-mail addressed to "c.litteer@cmu.edu" might actually match to the name "Help Center Service Leader" with the "c" matching to "Center" and "litteer" matching phonetically to "leader".
A less ambiguous example would be an e-mail addressed to "jenn.adams@cmu.edu". Using fuzzy matching, this e-mail would probably be delivered to Jennifer Adams.
Spammers send mail to thousands of ambiguous e-mail addresses, realizing that a large percentage of that mail will be delivered by mail systems that use fuzzy matching rules. Because of this, effective November 25, 2005, the Cyrus mail system will NO LONGER deliver e-mail based on fuzzy matching. This change in service is necessary to reduce the amount of spam received by campus affiliates.
