6.75 Million Reasons for a Guardian

During the month of October, just over 9 million emails were addressed to GroupWise users, of this, 75% (6,750,000) were identified as spam. However a large portion of junk email still managed to find its way into our mailboxes.

Swinburne University has now implemented the M+ Guardian Extreme Email Firewall to protect GroupWise users from this unwanted barrage of spam.

There are a number of significant enhancements to the way this new system works that will ultimately result in less spam getting through to your mailbox.

In addition to the usual checking, M+ Guardian is able to keep track of the reputation of source addresses and take appropriate action if the ratio of spam to legitimate email is too high. It is also able to prevent spammers from performing email harvest attacks, a process where they keep trying to guess valid email addresses.

With this new system, you get more choice as to how strict the filter is in quarantining your email. By default, the system is configured to use the ExtremeQuarantine filter to block more spam, however if you find that this is too strict, you can change your filter settings to one of the more lenient settings such as NormalQuarantine or StrongQuarantine.

If you do not want your email quarantined, but would still like some indication that the emails may be spam, you can change your options to TagAndRelease the spam. What this does is add an X-Spam header to the email so that if Junk Mail Handling is enabled in GroupWise, spam emails will be moved to your Junk folder.

One of the nice new features is that quarantined email can now be released from the email digest directly without having to login to the quarantine web site.

The new quarantine web site is easy to navigate and intuitive to use. A simple user guide and frequently asked questions are available on the ITS web site at: http://www.its.swinburne.edu.au/spam

As always, if you have any problems or issues with this new system that are not addressed in the frequently asked questions or user guide, please contact the ITS Service Desk on ext 5000.

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