Concerning Spam

About Spam Control

Spam and virus control on Park University's email systems are handled via three tiers of defense.

The first line of defense is the main email gateway on the PirateMail system, where spam and virus emails are controlled using Vexira AntiVirus. This solution allows for real-time blacklist subscriptions, custom blacklist maintenance, filtering by Subject field keyword patterns, and Bayesian content filtering (which "learns" through statistical probability what is or isn't a spam email). Diligent maintenance and extensive analysis of detected and reported spam emails serves to improve these filters regularly, for everyone's benefit. Altogether, these measures prevent over 4 million malicious emails from entering our network, monthly!

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

The third line of defense for staff accounts is provided by the Outlook 2003 email client itself, which controls spam emails through Bayesian content filtering. Outlook 2003 delivers emails it determines to be spam into a folder in your account named "Junk E-mail." (NOTE: If you are not using Outlook 2003 yet, then you will not have a "Junk Mail" folder.)

Your Responsibilities

There are three tasks that you as a user should 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 student correspondence or official University business, please be very careful about what web sites you provide your Park University email address to. 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 PirateMail faculty or student account, simply select the spam email(s) and click the "Report as Spam" action link. This will simultaneously report the spam and delete it.
• For an Outlook staff 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.

The third task is to regularly review the "Spam Mail" and / or "Junk E-mail" folders for emails known as false positives. False positives are legitimate emails that the Outlook 2003 or Trend Micro spam filters have incorrectly detected as spam (PirateMail users will not have these folders, as the system administrator monitors for false positives, and thus need only be diligent to the first two tasks). You can generally just delete any spam emails you find in these folders (again, do not report them; they have already been filtered), but if you find a false positive please use the "Not Junk" button in your tool bar to tell Outlook and / or Trend Micro that those types of email should not be marked as spam in the future. It will take some time to train the software, but eventually it will learn what you consider spam or not.

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