School of Medicine Spam Blocking

• How to View and Retrieve Blocked Spam
• Your Quarantine Mailbox
• Whitelist/Blacklist
• Quarantine Settings

Spam Firewall FAQ's (Frequently Asked Questions)

Introduction

The School of Medicine has implemented a Barracuda spam firewall appliance to block or quarantine spam email from being delivered to the inboxes of SOM Exchange users. This new spam firewall appliance provides the users ability to maintain personal white and black lists.

How spam blocking works

The SOM spam firewall appliance is designed to recognize and quarantine known and suspected spam messages. Messages from external email systems are evaluated for known spam patterns, known spam-originating sites, and suspicious words or phrases. Messages are evaluated and given a spam rating, and those designated as spam are quarantined and not delivered to SOM email inboxes. Once a day at 1:00AM, users receive a summary of messages that were addressed to them and quarantined. By following a link in this summary, users can view and retrieve quarantined messages. It is important to view the digest in a timely manner, as all quarantined emails are deleted after 21 days.

How to View and Retrieve Blocked Spam

To view quarantined messages, either click on the link in the Spam Quarantine Summary email or using a web browser, go to https://spam.medschool.ucsf.edu/ and log on using your SOM domain logon ID and password. These are the same credentials you use when accessing email.

top

Your Quarantine Mailbox

Once you log in your Quarantine Mailbox will look similar to the following:

Setting preferences for your Quarantine Mailbox

The PREFERENCES tab in your Quarantine Mailbox will display the following:

Whitelist/Blacklist

Click on the “Preferences” tab to make changes to your spam detection settings. You will be taken to the Whitelist/Blacklist sub-tab. Here you can see what addresses are currently on each list. You can also add and delete addresses as necessary. Email addresses on the Whitelist will not be filtered regardless of the spam score, while email addresses on the Blacklist will always be filtered. For more information on what a Whitelist/Blacklist is, click on the “?” button.

Quarantine Settings

From the “Preferences” tab click on the “Spam Settings” sub-tab. Here you can enable or disable your user quarantine.

Note: Disabling the quarantine will allow all messages normally quarantined to be delivered to your inbox with the [QUAR] tag in the subject line.

Spam Firewall FAQ's (Frequently Asked Questions)

top