The essentials

• When you go to the quarantine, you will be asked for a login and password.
• Your login is the e-mail address you commonly use .
• For most faculty and staff, that is lastname@chapin.edu (there about five to 10 exceptions).
• For most students, that is of the form 10DOE@chapin.edu using your year of graduation and three-letter designated initials.
• If you have received a spam message from our Barracuda, you were given a password.
• If you do not know your password or have misplaced it, you can click the CREATE NEW PASSWORD button where it says "Note: If you forget your password or do not have a password, type your email address in the Username box. Then, click Create New Password. A new password will be sent to you."

Overview

• From summer 2004 to summer 2006, we were using Brightmail. During this time, we had a system in which faculty, staff and students could drag spam messages to a special folder to help us with "whitelisting" and "blacklisting" adjustments. To "whitelist" an e-mail address is to indicate that a sender is valid and ensure that messages are delivered to the mailbox. To "blacklist" an e-mail address is to tell our system to never allow e-mail from that location.
• In spring 2006, as spam increased, we were getting too many reports of valid e-mail not getting through to Chapin faculty. (These are called "false positives" in the spam world.)
• To address this problem, we gave all faculty and staff universal access to the Brightmail quarantine in May 2006. (The word "quarantine" refers to the folder where probable spam goes to instead of to individual mailboxes.)
• For a variety of reasons, we switched from Brightmail to Barracuda in August 2006. There are numerous New York City-area independent schools that use Barracuda.
• One of the features that Barracuda allows (and that Brightmail did not) involves individual quarantines for each user

How do quarantines work?

• Each First Class user (faculty/staff member or Class 6-12 student) has a password-protected Web link that she or he can click to see probable spam received in the past 21 days. After 21 days, messages in quarantine are deleted.
• You don't need to read every message in your quarantine folder in order to quickly see that one note from Aunt Georgia or Uncle Larry never got to you.
• If you choose to never to look at your quarantine folder, the system is the same as it used to be.
• The fact that each user has an individual quarantine fits in well with the Chapin philosophy of "together, we empower."
• Once a week, each user will be sent an e-mail summary that will look like a spreadsheet with rows and columns. This will make it easy to see if you have had any false positives without reading the actual spam.
• Many of you know that you can configure your personal quarantine to show you either daily or weekly all "held" messages waiting to be deleted or delivered to your inbox. Your personal quarantine will now retain messages for 21 days. After 21 days any messages still in your quarantine will be permanently deleted. If for any reason you know that you will not have access to Chapin e-mail for over 21 days, please contact someone in the Tech department, and we can make special arrangements to accommodate your needs.

A few other thoughts about spam

• There is always a balance between "tight spam control" and "false positives." The tighter the spam control, the more likely there will be more false positives. That is why having individual quarantines is a "good to great" idea; it allows us to set tighter spam controls without worrying about the negative effects on individual users.
• Spam has become a worldwide problem in the last five years. You can read more about the growth of spam from wikipedia. You might learn facts such as these: In 1978, the first reported electronic spam was sent to 600 addresses. The first usage of the word "spam" dates to 1993, by Joel Furr. In 2005, we were seeing 30 billion spam messages per day, and in 2006, estimates reached 55 billion per day.
• Below are stats from our first month of using Barracuda:

• The company we are using for spam control and Barracuda support is Promenet, located in Manhattan ... click here
• The company that makes Barracuda is based in Mountain View, California (www.Barracudanetworks.com). It started in 2002 and has more than 35,000 customers, including the U.S. Treasury Department.

Last updated 07.07.07

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