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Faculties & Departments
Computer Centre
Combating SPAM Email at NUI Maynooth
SPAM emails are unsolicited mails sent in bulk to valid email accounts. These can vary from harmless advertisements for commercial products to offensive material and financial scams. SPAM creates problems for email users as it creates extra network traffic and wastes human resources where recipients have to trawl through scores of irrelevant material to access their bone fide communications.
NUI Maynooth, like many large organisations and private individuals has been a target of SPAM for some time. Spammers acquire email address in different ways. Sometimes people subscribe to mailing lists which are accessed by spammers. In other cases large organisations are easily targeted because email addresses are easy to guess e.g. joe.bloggs@nuim.ie.
NUI Maynooth's Response
In order to combat SPAM at NUI Maynooth, the Computer Centre is pleased to announce the implementation of a package designed to filter potential SPAM from incoming emails.
Copperfasten Mail Firewall Appliance is a program designed to identify and block SPAM email on the network. All incoming emails will be scanned by the program and checked against standard criteria. Emails identified by the program as SPAM are placed in a quarantine folder on the server and a report is sent to your inbox, each day, listing the emails that have been quarantined on your behalf.
A typical report will contain a list of:
- Spam Messages quarantined, and
- Viruses blocked
The “Score” column indicates the SPAM score assigned to your e-mail message based on a series of tests done by Copperfasten. An e-mail message scoring above 5 is considered SPAM and this list is ordered by Score. The “From” column is the e-mail address of the person who sent you the message. The “Subject” column is the e-mail's subject and the “Date” column, when the e-mail was sent.
With the above information you can determine if you wish to accept any of the quarantined e-mails. Although they are scored as SPAM they may be e-mails you want, for example a technical newsletter.
Having reviewed the report you should click one of the following in the Actions column:
Deliver: To release your e-mail from quarantine and deliver it to your inbox
Whitelist: To deliver your e-mail to your mailbox and in addition add the sender to your personal whitelist. This means that any future e-mails from this address will be delivered to your inbox even if they are marked as SPAM.
Delete:To remove the e-mail from your quarantine area and it will treated as SPAM by the Appliance database .
Once you have performed the actions on selected e-mail messages, you should click the Delete All Messages Link at the bottom of the list of SPAM messages.
When you click a Link you will receive confirmation of your action via a web browser window. For example “Quarantined message has been deleted” will be displayed when the Delete Link has been clicked.
The quarantine lifetime is set to 4 weeks i.e. after this time your messages will be automatically deleted from the quarantine.
You will receive the report every weekday the report on Monday will include the quarantine details for the previous weekend.
Virus Messages Blocked
You will see the following type of list in your e-mail report. This part of the report is informational only. It useful if someone you trust has sent you an e-mail but it's blocked because it contained a virus, you will then know why you didn't receive it.
You should click the Delete All Messages to remove the virus notifications if you haven't already done so.
Having spent a couple of months testing Copperfasten to ensure its compatibility with the NUI Maynooth mail system, the Computer Centre rolled out the service to selected departments on a pilot basis. This final phase of the testing is now drawing to a close and Copperfasten will be rolled out to all email users on 25 April 2005 .
This service will reduce many of the unsolicited emails that are currently clogging up the University mail system while providing our users with an opportunity to recover or whitelist any emails inadvertently designated as SPAM on the basis of objective assessments run by Copperfasten.
Configuring your Quarantine Settings
For advanced users it is possible to configure your quarantine settings by clicking on the link at the bottom of the report.