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Spam is unsolicited commercial e-mail, mostly junk mail and viruses. ITS staff devote a lot of time fixing issues caused by viruses and denial-of-service attacks, which come via spam. E-mail users spend a lot of time sorting through their e-mail for legitimate messages. Additionally, network bandwidth is being diverted from legitimate uses and disk space is being consumed by unwanted bulk e-mail.
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Fordham has engaged a third party vendor, called Postini Corporation, to aid in Spam reduction. Essentially, all e-mail bound for Fordham University from the external world is filtered through processes that look for junk e-mail and viruses. Suspicious e-mail is held in quarantine while the rest passes through to Fordham. Quarantined e-mail is held for fourteen (14) days. You are notified when you have quarantined e-mail, so you can verify that the quarantined messages are indeed spam and are not legitimate messages.
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Notification is sent from Postini to your Lotus Notes e-mail account if you have quarantined messages. This notification includes a summary of your quarantined messages (QSum), including the sender and subject. To view a quarantined message from within this e-mail notification, simply click thesubject of the message. You will then be redirected to login, if you are not already logged in.The QSum message also includes a Deliver link next to each message. To have the message delivered to your Lotus inbox simply click this link. You will not be required to log into your Message Center.
- A Message Center link is included in the message, so you can simply click the link and then login. Or, you may just go to http://login.postini.com at any time to review your quarantined messages.
- Quarantined messages are held at Postini’s website for fourteen (14) days.
- The first notification you receive from Postini includes apassword. The first time you log into Postini, you are prompted to change your password. For simplicity, we recommend that you make your Postini password the same as your Lotus iNotes password.
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Yes, if you have been sent an e-mail message containing a virus you will receive a separate notification from Postini. The sender will be “Fordham University's Anti-Spam Message Center Support" and the subject will be “Fordham University's Anti-Spam Message Center Detected Potential Virus.” Each message passed through Postini’s architecture is evaluated with patented heuristics-based anti-spam and virus engines, which separate junk mail and viruses from legitimate messages. Legitimate messages pass-through to the addressee while junk mail is quarantined.
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No, these filters are not perfect, but there are no perfect Spam filters. Occasionally a legitimate message may be quarantined. Additionally, it is possible that junk mail or spam may pass-through and find itself in your Lotus Notes inbox. Fordham recommends that you log into Postini and review your quarantined messages every few days.
Once you login, you may elect to have a quarantined message delivered to your Lotus Notes inbox. You will be asked if you want messages from that particular sender delivered in the future. You may then elect to have all future messages from that sender ‘passed-through’ and delivered to your inbox.
On the other hand, there may be messages that are passed-though incorrectly. These may be blocked in the future by logging in and specifying that messages from this particular e-mail address should be quarantined, (by specifying name@spam.com). Additionally, you may block all messages from that particular domain (by specifying spam.com).
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Yes! This anti-spam/anti-virus service is available to all students, faculty and staff who have a valid Lotus Notes e-mail account. All valid Lotus Notes name@fordham.edu accounts can be filtered by Postini.
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There are no significant additional delays in delivery of e-mail messages. Before contracting with Postini, all filtering was done locally by Fordham SMTP servers. This process has been pushed out to Postini, so our local servers are freed up to handle legitimate e-mail traffic. This saves bandwidth, server capacity and administrative costs.
It is possible, as it was when Fordham processed all incoming e-mail, that a particular message may be delayed from one minute to thirty minutes, due to timeouts and retries at any given point along the delivery path.
Additionally, in the event that Postini detects some kind of attack, socket-blocking will be put in place against the offending IP. This means that messages originating from that particular IP address will be denied, for up to one hour. Incoming messages from this IP address will be queued until such time as they can be delivered.
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Your login username is your e-mail account, (yourname@fordham.edu).
If you forgot your Postini password, or never received a Postini password, simply try to login incorrectly. In other words, type anything into the password prompt. A page displays stating Invalid log in or server error. Please try again. Also on this page is a link, Forgot your password? Click the link and follow the instructions. A new password will be sent to your Fordham Lotus Notes e-mail account.
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Postini does not automatically delete e-mail messages; rather they are held in quarantine so that you have an opportunity to review them and take action. However, e-mail messages are only held for fourteen (14) days. After fourteen (14) days, they will be deleted.
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The filters look for suspicious content and known bad senders. This is not a perfect process, so there may be legitimate messages quarantined. To fix this, log into Postini and specify that this particular message be delivered. You will be asked if you want all future messages from that sender to bypass the filters and be delivered automatically.
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The filters look for suspicious content and known bad senders. This is not a perfect process, so there may be times when spam gets passed through and delivered to your Lotus Notes inbox. To fix this, log into Postini and add this particular sender to your blocked senders list.
Additionally, you may forward the message to spam@postini.com. Don’t type anything or explain anything in the message, just forward it. This e-mail is not viewed by a real person, it is processed by computers.
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Quarantined messages are held for fourteen (14) days. After fourteen (14) days the messages are deleted. It is recommended that you log into Postini every few days to review your quarantined messages.
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Postini only filters e-mail messages coming into Fordham from the outside world. Internally, Fordham uses Sybari Antigen®: for Lotus Domino, which is an additional, server-based line-of-defense against worms, viruses and spam. So, essentially, all internal e-mail messages are protected as well.
However, both of these protective processes are only as good as the latest, most up-to-date virus signatures available. There is always the possibility that someone will send an as-yet unknown virus.
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No! E-mail messages are scanned by Postini computers. No one is reading e-mail message content.
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You have every right to log into Postini and turn off all filtering of your e-mail messages! If you do this, all messages will be delivered to your Lotus Notes e-mail account.
Postini does not use any university-defined criteria to filter e-mail messages. By default, there is a moderate level of filtering turned on when you first use this service. You may log into Postini and change the default settings – in any way – including turning off all filtering.
Fordham does recommend, however, that you keep the virus protection turned on. This is important as it protects the network for all users.
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Considerable resources, (human and machine) are expended resolving issues due to unwanted bulk and infected e-mail. By utilizing a third party service, IT staff can concentrate on the needs of the Fordham community. Additionally, since all e-mail is filtered before it gets to Fordham, spam and viruses are stopped. Thus, network bandwidth is no longer diverted from legitimate uses and disk space is not being consumed by unwanted bulk e-mail.
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Your address is safe. It is confidential and not used for marketing in any way.
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