3 June 2008
Better Spam Filtering for the Medical Campus
|
A new spam filtering service is being activated this week for medical campus Exchange email users. The much greater accuracy of the new filtering service will reduce the amount of spam arriving in your inbox (false negatives) and also reduce the amount of non-spam being blocked (false positives). That accuracy is critical, since as much as 99 percent of the email sent to the campus is spam.
The new spam filtering service works similarly to the current one, but you will notice a few changes:
- For a few days, during the transition, you may receive more than one spam "digest" report for a particular email address. (One from the old system, one from the new.) These reports list all the blocked messages for your email address, and allow you to release the ones that you actually want to receive. Use extreme caution when so doing, given the prevalence of malware and phishing scams in spam.
- Blocked email messages will be held in "quarantine" for 14 days (the old limit was 5 days). After that, if not released by you, they'll be deleted.
- You will need to create a new "safe-list" of email addresses that you wish to exempt from spam filtering. Any safe-listing from the old system cannot be migrated to the new one. Given the low rate of false positives (legitimate messages tagged as spam), we expect that you'll need to safe-list only rarely. Indeed, we expect you'll need to look at the spam digest report only rarely for false positives.
You will be able to create a "block-list" of email addresses and email domains that you wish to block. Previously you could only block-list email addresses in your email client software, most commonly Outlook. The greater accuracy of the new filtering should also reduce the need for block-listing. (Note that you cannot block-list med.miami.edu email domain addresses, as intra-campus mail is not subject to spam filtering.)
|
 |
|
A link in your daily spam report will take you to a personal web page that lists all blocked messages still in quarantine, and allows specification of safe-list and block-list addresses. If you decide you don't want these daily spam reports, contact the Help Desk (help@med.miami.edu or 305-243-5999) requesting that the reports be discontinued. (If you requested this previously, you'll need to do so again. We ask that you try the new spam filtering service for a while before making that call.)
Related content
|
|
• • • • •
- For past Technology Update topics, see the Series Index.
- To contact Medical Information Technology staff, go to Contact Us.
- To reach the Medical Information Technology Help Desk, send email to help@med.miami.edu or call 305-243-5999.
|
