Computing Security

SOU Spam Firewall

SOU Information Technology (IT) and Google provide a Postini Spam Firewall which dramatically reduces the amount of spam delivered to your email inbox. The Postini filters both the Faculty/Staff, and Student email accounts. It also scans for viruses in email attachments. The system uses a number of sophisticated methods to identify spam. Each day the system is automatically updated with the latest spam “fingerprints” which are similar to virus definition files. These fingerprints are just one of the methods it uses to identify spam.

Most people will just be happy that they are getting a lot less spam, and won't need to interact with the spam firewall at all. Others may want to take advantage of some of the features listed below.

Guarding against false positives

A false positive is a legitimate email that gets discarded as spam. The spam firewall uses very sophisticated methods to detect spam and won't often make this mistake. However there are some instances when it could happen. For example faculty or students in classes where they might be discussing sex or prescription drugs. The spam filter may see certain keywords in these emails that cause it to think they are spam. To avoid this problem read the next two sections carefully.

Quarantined mail

The spam firewall classifies mail into following categories:

• "Delivered" which is delivered to you normally.
• "Viruses" which contain infections and are discarded, you'll never see them.
• "Junk" is email that has been classified as Spam.  These emails will be reported to you once a day in an email from the Postini system.

Personal Whitelists

You can maintain your own list of trusted addresses that you know won't send you spam. If the spam firewall mistakenly marks an email as spam you can choose to whitelist the sender so that it won't happen again. See Managing your Whitelist to learn more about your whitelist.

What about Gmail Junk Mail handling?

The Postini filter makes Gmail Junk Mail handling unnecessary. If you've already configured your options for Gmail Junk Mail handling you won't have to make any changes. You should just notice that your junk mail folder is no longer full of spam. If you have setup Gmail Junk Mail handling to put everything in your junk mail folder that is not from someone in your address book, you may find that you can now turn off this feature.