Smith College TechNotes blog

A few days ago, students were reporting that they were unable to receive messages from senders at Roadrunner.com or Adelphia.net. These messages were blocked by one of the two systems that all incoming email passes through before it gets to your Smith inbox.

Emails from Roadrunner.com and Adelphia.net were being blocked by the first filtering check inbound email hits. Instead of automatically blocking traffic from Roadrunner.com and Adelphia.net, those emails will be given a “bad” spam score so that they can be quarantined instead of completely blocked.

So, legitimate email messages from Roadrunner.com and Adelphia.net should now end up in the MessageScreen quarantine, where you can tell MessageScreen to always trust email from that user and have future emails sent to the inbox.

Why is spam filtering at Smith so strict?

Every day, about 700,000 messages are sent to Smith email addresses. Those incoming emails first go through the McAffee Secure Content Management (SCM) Appliance. The appliance’s original purpose was to protect Smith from email-borne-viruses. Today, the appliance’s primary purpose is to perform preliminary spam blocking. Although the McAfee SCM appliance still provides protection from viruses, these normally account for less than 1%, while about 90% are blocked each day because they are marked as SPAM.

The email messages that pass the McAfee SCM appliance are delivered to MessageScreen for further spam analysis and messages can still be blocked or quarantined there. On average, about half of the messages that get to Message Screen are either blocked or quarantined based on their SPAM analysis.

So, when you receive emails detailing your MessageScreen Quarantine, those messages only represent about 5% of the spam sent to Smith everyday.

Using MessageScreen to Manage Quarantined Messages