ITS Policies - SPAM Blocking
Background:
During the FY 05-06 school year, SVSU received, on the average, 180,000 e-mails a day from off campus. At times, this volume peaked at over 200,000 a day. (These numbers do not include internal or SVSU to SVSU e-mail.) SVSU’s SPAM filter "tags" about 75% of this incoming e-mail as SPAM, about the national average at universities.
During FY 06-07 incoming e-mail peaked at 1,400,000 messages a day. As a result in late April of 2007 SVSU expanded its SPAM filtering to include Bayesian inference logic. This reduced the amount of e-mail accepted from 15% down to between 5% and 8 %.
SPAM Blocking
- On August 12th, 2006, SVSU began blocking & discarding "verified" SPAM.
- On September 1st, 2006 SVSU began blocking "probable" SPAM.
- On June 18th, 2007, SVSU adopted a policy of masking faculty and staff e-mail addresses from off-campus quires. This will stop SPAM bots and individuals from harvesting e-mail addresses for SPAM usage. This policy affects both departmental web pages and the web-based directory lookup. The masking will allow an off campus users to send an e-mail to an employee but not actually see the e-mail address.
Personal Controls and Reporting:
- SVSU treats incoming SPAM just like we treat an incoming e-mail with a virus; we will discard it before it gets inside. The SPAM filter software will be dynamically updated by the vendor, just like our anti-virus software.
- SVSU will capture a log of the sender ("to"), the recipient ("from") and the subject line. We will not capture the message itself.
- Faculty, staff, and students will be able to request a daily log of blocked messages. To register click on: start or stop the daily log
- Members of the campus community can develop a personal exception list of senders that will pass thru the SPAM filter, called "white listing."
- Faculty and staff who wish to develop a personal "white list" should contact the ITD lab for the 15 minute training session.
- Students who wish to develop a personal "white list" should contact the STC for the 15 minute training session
- If a staff or faculty member can justify globally "white listing" an e-mail source please e-mail your justification to
Support@svsu.edu . ITS staff will work with you to ensure the narrowest white-listing will occur.
- Members of the campus community can use personal SPAM control settings that are more restrictive than the University settings.
- Faculty and staff who wish to use more restrictive SPAM controls should contact the ITD lab for the 15 minute training session.
- Students who wish to use more restrictive SPAM controls should contact the STC for the 15 minute training session.