Introduction to the Spam Firewall

We now have a Barracuda 400 Spam Firewall which will dramatically reduce the amount of spam we a getting at SOU. This firewall filters the mail for both the Faculty/Staff, and Student e-mail systems. It also scans for viruses in e-mail 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. Follow this link for the technical details of how the Spam Firewall works.

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 message 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 messages that trigger it to think they are spam. To avoid this problem read the next two sections carefully. Note that on campus e-mail, including mail between faculty/staff and students, will not be filtered at all.

Quarantined mail:

The spam firewall classifies mail into three categories, “definitely not spam”, “maybe spam”, and “definitely spam”. The not spam is delivered to you normally, and the spam is deleted. The maybe spam is held in your personal quarantine. Each day you will get a message from the spam filter showing the messages that have been quarantined. From this message you will be able to release or delete messages. Released messages will get delivered to you normally. Follow the Managing your Quarantine link to learn more about your quarantine.

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 a message as spam you can choose to whitelist the sender so that it won't happen again. Follow the Managing your Whitelist link to learn more about your whitelist.

What about GroupWise junk mail handling?

The new Spam Firewall should make GroupWise junk mail handling unnecessary. If you've already configured your options for GroupWise 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 GroupWise 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. After we have used the Spam Firewall for a while we may make changes to the way it works that would include using GroupWise junk mail handling. For example if we find that too much mail is getting quarantined at the Spam Firewall we have the option of tagging the messages as spam and letting GroupWise put them in the junk mail folder. Either way the results should be much better then with GroupWise alone.

What about the Student E-Mail System?

The new Spam Firewall will be protecting the student system as well as the faculty and staff system. Currently the students have very few options for spam handling. This will be a big improvement for them.