Concerning Spam

About Spam Control

Spam and virus control on Park University's email systems are handled via three tiers of defense. The first and best line of defense is at the University's email gateway level, where all incoming email traffic is scanned by an enterprise-grade Barracuda Spam & Virus Firewall. On average each day, this system prevents over 200,000 malicious or unsolicited emails from delivering to our user's inboxes... which is around 95% of our total daily volume of incoming email! The remaining 5% of these are passed through two more tiers of defense, at the email server level, before being delivered to your Inbox.

The second line of defense is our enterprise anti-virus solution, Trend Micro Neat Suite, which is installed on all servers and workstations. Trend Micro primarily controls viruses, but also has spam prevention filters which affect the Microsoft Exchange server housing our staff email system. If an email slips past the Barracuda defenses and is detected by Trend Micro as spam, it will flag the message for delivery to a folder in your Exchange account named "Spam Email."

The third line of defense differs depending on whether you are a student or adjunct faculty, or whether you are staff or full-time faculty.

Students and adjunct faculty are provided email accounts in Park University's Google Apps service, which is additionally protected by Google's Postini anti-spam and anti-virus service. If Postini detects an email as spam, it will deliver it to a folder in your GMail account labeled "Spam," instead of to your Inbox.

Staff and full-time faculty email accounts exist on the internal staff email system, where the third tier of protection is provided by the Outlook email client itself, which controls spam emails through Bayesian content filtering. Outlook delivers emails it determines to be spam into a folder in your Exchange account named "Junk E-Mail," instead of to your Inbox.

Your Responsibilities

Here are some tasks that you should try to do to optimize your email experience with Park University.

The first and most important task, is to avoid using your Park University email address casually on the Internet. The Internet is a very dangerous place for an innocent email address, and it does not take much for that address to be exploited. If you do need to use it for something other than academic correspondence or official University business, please be very careful about what web sites you use your Park University email address with. Unfortunately, even the least-used email address will eventually be harvested in some fashion and used for spam, but it is much less likely than one used to sign up for anything and everything on the Internet. :-)

The second task, is to report spam that delivers to your Inbox folder:

• For a Google Apps email account, simply select the spam email(s) and click the "Report spam" button. This will simultaneously mark the message as spam for your account and remove it from your Inbox.
• For an Outlook/Exchange email account, please forward the spam email to pirate@park.edu with the Subject of "Outlook Spam Report," and then delete it.

Please, only report spam that delivers to the Inbox, not to one of the Junk or Spam folders. Emails in these folders were already detected as spam by one of our tiers of defense, and cannot reasonably be further remediated. Either keep them or delete them, at your discretion, thank you!

With your cooperation, we will be better able to provide the entire University with email services minimally affected by spam.