Spam filter scaled back temporarily
If you've been having trouble communicating with certain instructors via e-mail lately, it may be due to a issue with the Central Michigan University servers.
The Office of Information Technology is restructuring a CMU e-mail server procedure in order to keep users secure without losing important messages.
On Thursday afternoon, OIT announced that a filtering procedure implemented on Feb. 26 to fight phishing attacks has been scaled back because too many legitimate messages were being lost.
Duane Kleinhardt, IT Communications Manager, said that software evaluates every message sent to an address on CMU's server, to determine whether that message is spam.
"Our servers use certain attributes of an e-mail when it comes in to determine if it's spam," Kleinhardt said. "If the subject line is in all-caps, that will increase the 'spam score.'"
Kleinhardt said the procedure, or "policy," in question filtered out some legitimate e-mails sent from cmich.edu accounts, but not actually sent through the server itself.
"There are instructors that use off-campus teaching tools to send e-mails to their students, and those e-mails weren't allowed to be sent," Kleinhardt said.
It also kept e-mails from being sent from a cmich.edu address through a mail client like Microsoft Outlook Express.
The procedure was written to combat "phishing" messages - e-mails that appear to be from the university that ask for personal information or account passwords to use for malicious intent.
Kleinhardt said OIT intends to put some version of the phishing protection back up after the outside server issue is addressed.
"Phishing is a scourge to the Internet," Kleinhardt said.
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