MySpam Issues & Status

Background
Issues In Progress
Issues Resolved

Background

The management of unsolicited e-mail, spam, is the number one challenge facing both the users and e-mail administrators of Notre Dame’s central e-mail system (nd.edu). Today, over a million e-mail messages a day are sent to the Notre Dame campus; over 90% of which fall into the category of spam.

This past Fall the University replaced the equipment used to provide the campus with spam filtering services due to significant performance issues which resulted in delays in delivery of e-mail, and in some cases, lost e-mail messages.  Lost e-mail is an unacceptable situation, and as a result, the OIT expedited the evaluation of replacement alternatives so as to avoid the possibility of further lost e-mail. 

However, the new service has exhibited problems that did not appear in our expedited testing, and while they are less severe than those seen with the old service, they are nonetheless concerning to us and members of the campus community.  The list of known issues and their resolution timeline is below.

Whereas the previous vendor was unresponsive to our requests for resolutions to issues, the new vendor is committed to fixing the spam filtering issues as quickly as possible, and many have already been resolved.  However, some issues remain, and the OIT Messaging Services team will continue to work with the vendor on these issues over the coming weeks.  If you have additional questions or problems with spam filtering for your Notre Dame e-mail account, please contact the OIT Help Desk at oithelp@nd.edu or 574-631-8111.

Issues In Progress

Issues with the Quarantine Message Organizer web interface - awaiting vendor ugrade
A variety of issues, including the need to "refresh and then reload" the page, a new release from the vendor will resolve these issues.

Summary page has no links or summary information - future enhancement
When you log into myspam.nd.edu, the default screen provides minimal relevant information on the Summary tab. We have not yet activated additional features of the system that would normally appear on this page. We expect to activate those features sometime in 2008. You must click on the Quarantine or Mail Processing tabs to review messages or modify settings. Optionally, in some email clients you can click on the Delete button at the bottom of the e-mail quarantine summary that you receive, and after entering your NetID and password, the Quarantine screen will appear.

Issues Resolved

Vacation auto-reply - occurred between 11/8/07 - 12/10/07
For a period of several weeks, vacation auto-reply was not working consistently. This affected those who set start and end dates in their auto-reply configuration. Changes made to update myspam on 11/8/07 introduced this problem, and we subsequently resolved it on 12/10/07. Note: Changes to e-mail options configured at https://eds.nd.edu take up to 2 hours to take effect.

Continuing notices from the Barracuda spam appliance - resolved 12/10/07
The Barracuda spam appliance is still active, causing some users to receive spam quarantine notices. Administrators disabled all user accounts and notifications on 12/10/07.

Opt-out - available as of 12/7/07
We have received requests from some users who wish to opt-out of the spam filtering service and would like ALL mail delivered to their inbox so they can filter it personally.  This option became available as of 12/7/07.  You can request all e-mail, including spam, to be delivered to your inbox by contacting the OIT Help Desk (631-8111) and providing a list of all of your ND e-mail addresses and aliases that you would like configured in this way. System administrators will make the needed adjustments for your addresses and notify you when it has been completed. Please keep in mind, you may see a 1000% increase in your e-mail if you choose to opt-out of spam filtering.

Delivery delay when releasing messages from quarantine - resolved 12/4/07
Messages released from quarantine were delayed in delivery to the inbox. We made changes to the service on 12/4/07 which resolved this problem.

E-mail from some legitimate sources blocked -- resolved 9/20/07
The spam filtering service blocked e-mail from some legitimate sources (e.g., NY Times subscriptions) due to heavy traffic which caused the system to drop connections from external mail servers. We made configuration changes on 9/20/07 which resolved this problem.