Some students receive unusual e-mails
Some spam and pornographic e-mails have been able to avoid detection by the Webmail firewall, causing some Utah State University students to receive offensive materials.
Michelle Robinson, a junior majoring in horticulture, said she began receiving e-mails with vulgar subject lines two weeks ago.
“It came out of the blue,” Robinson said, “Now I receive at least one pornographic e-mail per day, or usually more.”
In addition to the pornographic e-mails, spam has been a inconvenience for some students.
Julie Burgess, a junior majoring in restoration conservation ecology, said she hasn’t received any porn, but receives between 10 to 15 spam e-mails per week. She said the spam is annoying, because the e-mails are in regards to products or information she is not interested in.
Students receiving pornographic and spam e-mails is not a new problem, said Bob Bayn, the associate director of Network and Computing Services at USU, however with the Barracuda firewall filtering all the Webmail servers at USU, the amount of spam and pornography has been reduced.
Bayn said he is not aware of any problems with the firewall, and it is functioning as effective as it is capable of.
“We’ll get over one quarter of a million messages a day, there is no way to do a visual scan of all the e-mail that comes in,” Bayn said. “We block well over half of the spam and pornographic e-mails sent to the university.”
One of the main criteria in distinguishing porn and spam from other e-mails, Bayn said, is if the e-mail is from a known spammer e-mail address. If the address is recognized as a known spammer, the e-mail is automatically rejected, and will not be received on a Webmail account.
Bayn said the firewall will also search the e-mail for other indicators
such as keywords, too many capital letters, too many exclamation points, as well as more than 600 other indicators in determining if it is to be blocked.
Despite the filtering of the firewall, Bayn said, some spam and porn will still be able to make it past the firewall. Bayn said if students continue to receive unwanted e-mails, they can establish a filter which would be specific to their Webmail account.
Some students, such as Robinson, are not aware of this additional filter, who said she did not know she could create a filter for her Webmail account to block specific e-mail address or e-mails containing certain keywords.
As effective as the personal filter can be, one of the disadvantages is that it might filter out some innocent e-mails, Bayn said. He said he would recommend not making the filter list too extensive.
“For example, an e-mail about rape would usually be considered offensive,” he said, “however, if a student is doing a report about rape, and tried to e-mail themselves information for the report, it will be rejected by the filter.”
To create the personal filter for a Webmail account, a student must first go to the Webmail home page, than select “Account Maintenance” (on the left side of the screen under Account Information), than select “Build a filter-at-delivery,” enter their username and password and select “Submit to begin building filter.” Students can also contact the HelpDesk at 797-4358 for additional assistance.
-cmoffitt@cc.usu.edu