Managing SPAM e-mails with Barracuda

To help reduce the number of SPAM and virus infested e-mails you receive, COSINe has purchased and installed a Barracuda Spam Firewall system.  All e-mail destined for College of Science Email accounts will be scanned by this system.

The default configuration will work in the following way:

How Virus Infected Attachments are handled:

• If the system receives an e-mail which has a known virus attached to it, the message will be dropped.  (NOTE:  This message will *not* be delivered to your inbox, and the sender will *not* be notified that delivery failed)

How Spam and Possible Spam messages are handled:

• If the system receives an e-mail which scores a 7 on a scale from 1-10, that message is blocked (not delivered - deleted).
• If the system receives an e-mail which scores between a 4 and 7, then the Subject line is modified to include the tag  [SPAM] and delivers the message to you.  You can then decide whether or not the message is Spam.  You can also configure your e-mail client, or sieve filter, to automatically file these tagged e-mails into a junk folder for inspection later.

How Emails with possible dangerous attachments are handled:

• Even though the virus scanning should prevent any dangerous attachments from reaching you, there is that possibility.  To help protect you and others on the network, we flag and hold onto all e-mails which have the following extensions:
  • bat, cmd, com, cpl, crt, dll, exe, hlp, inf, js, lnk, msi, pif, reg, scr, vb, vbs, wsh
• All e-mails which have attachments which could be dangerous will be held in a quarantined inbox, and COSINe will look at this inbox daily.  If there is an e-mail addressed to you, we will contact you to let you know that we have it and we can send it to you (only accept the e-mail if you were expecting one).
• If you have an account on the barracuda system, these e-mails will be placed into your quarantened inbox, and you will notified by e-mail that they exist.

If you would like to modifiy the default behavior of the system, request that an individual account be created by sending an Email to spam@science.oregonstate.edu. An account provides access to individual control over what the Barracuda system considers SPAM for your account, as well as giving your the ability to disable all spam filtering if that is what you desire. Virus scanning and attachment blocking, however, cannot be so broadly manipulated.  Please read the attached PDF document for more information regarding updating your account specific settings.

Any/all e-mails which are held in a quarantine inbox (either the global inbox, or the one associated with your account) on the barracuda system will be deleted after 60 days.

*NOTE: If you recieve e-mails from multiple domains/addresses, you will only need one account on the Barracuda server.  That account name will be your science e-mail address (<user>@science.oregonstate.edu), but will also work for your other e-mail addresses (<user>@math.oregonstate.edu, <user>@math.orst.edu, etc)