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Top Email Issues

Spam

Dealing With Spam UC Irvine and UCI Health Information Services SPAM Mitigation Efforts

University policy for addressing SPAM - Currently all inbound UC Irvine email is received and routed for delivery by Office of Information Technology (OIT). OIT provides a central service for scanning all email to identify unwanted junk email. UCI Health email uses this service to provide a barrier against unwanted email as well to avoid cluttering your Inbox with junk email. A full explanation of the service and how to fully utilize the filtering to reduce your Inbox clutter is listed here. (LINK?)

Server side spam filtering:

UC Irvine (Campus) Spam filtering (SpamAssassin)- OIT's SPAM filters are set up to allow all "possible" junk email to be delivered. Only extremely offensive/egregious junk email or email originating from known SPAM sources is dropped. In order to properly filter "possible" junk email please use a rule within Outlook to send these borderline emails to a Junk folder. Please use these instructions (they work on all versions of Outlook). If you feel outside emails are falsely being labeled as SPAM or that they aren't being delivered due to these filters please contact the UCI Health Postmaster with dates and times of emails that might have been dropped. Information such as the senders email address and possibly the subject line helps in tracking down these lost emails. We will assist you if your legitimate, work related emails are being blocked. For setup instructions on using the SpamAssassin filters to minimize your Junk email please go to http://www.oit.uci.edu/email/spam/filter.html

UCI Health SPAM filtering - UCI Health currently does a cursory scan for viruses and spam on our front end email systems. We currently rely on OIT's services for in depth scanning and filtering. We do utilize two well known services to check for problem emails. We use Spamhaus as a filter for junk email sources and we do not accept email that originates from sources that are listed on the Spamhaus SPAM list. We also utilize Microsoft's Intelligent Message Filter to provide up to date and heuristic-based message filtering techniques. We allow emails with Spam Confidence Levels of 9 and lower. 

Client side spam filtering:

SpamAssassin 

Please go to the link http://www.oit.uci.edu/email/spam/filter.html for more information. This is a central campus service provided to all email users.

Safe Senders

Outlook utilizes a Safe Senders option to avoid known good email from being falsely identified as SPAM. At times a email may be forwarded from someone and that email is flagged as "Junk" or SPAM. In order to avoid this from happening users will need to add the senders to their Safe Senders list. A full explanation on how to do this is listed here. (LINK?)

Currently we recommend the following email addresses be added to your Safe Senders list: mailsvc@alpha.ddm.uci.edu (UCI Health Information Services is Zotmail), postmaster@hs.uci.edu (UCI Health Information Services is Health Affair's email administration account) In order to stay abreast of current campus news you MUST add these addresses to your Outlook configuration. Emergency security bulletins and campus issues are communicated via Zotmails.  For setup instructions on Safe Senders go here. (LINK?)

Outlook junk email filtering

Microsoft uses SmartScreen technology to provide Outlook users with a more secure messaging interface. UCI Health Sciences pushes out updates to our Outlook users as updates are available. This allows users to prevent malicious content from being executed on their systems. This is not a totally foolproof system, but it allows for a more effective client/server secure messaging environment. Used along with the client side rules that work with OIT's spam filters (see below) this provides a VERY good junk email filtering system.

Web BASED Mail - Outlook Web Access (OWA)

UCI Health Information Services Web Based Email is available here »

UCI Health offers remote email access via web browsers.  We fully support access via Internet Explorer v.6.1 or higher for access to all OWA 2007 features.  We do offer access from non Microsoft browsers such as Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Mozilla and Safari, but in some cases with a less robust interface.  While we do understand the user community we support is not always standardized on Windows operating systems, or on Internet Explorer, the hope is that the features that we can offer using these two Microsoft centric software applications is robust enough to give our clients a very productive remote access thin/web client.  There are several options on non-Internet Explorer web browsers that are not available, but these options are mostly added value features and not limitations in basic functionality.

Workarounds such as the Internet Explorer rendering engine plug-in with Firefox can be tried, but we will not be able to support the plug-ins since they are always in a state of being updated and changed by the Mozilla development community.

Deleted Items

We do not remove deleted items from your mailbox for up to 14 days after they have been removed from your Deleted Items folder. These "deleted" items stay on our system for up to 14 days in a folder that is hidden from your view. These items that have been removed from your Deleted Items folder are kept in a repository that allows you to recover them in the event of an emergency. They do not count against your quota and they go away after the 14 day retention period without any action on your part. This is referred to as the "dumpster" by email administrators. This information does take up room on our system, but this extra room is accounted for in the overall system design.

Your quota reflects all information in your Inbox and subfolders but not the dumpster. Your dumpster size is typically 15% of the mailbox size.

Please note that we will not recover data after the 14 day period has expired. See Email Service Costs and Policies  for more information.

Zotmail

University of California, Irvine provides a central campus messaging system for regular employee updates as well as for emergency information updates.  Currently all UCI Health employees should be aware that these messages are critical for the safety and welfare of all employees. 

UCI Health Information Services will periodically be informed of problems related to these messages being filed under Junk email folders.  This behavior is likely the result of inadvertent client side behavior and not by SPAM or antivirus filtering.  Typically the issue arises when a message is sent which is then classified by a user as "junk" email.  Because Zotmails originate from the same email addresses specifying any Zotmail as SPAM could cause a problem.  A Zotmail can be "sent" from various users, but they always come from the same originating address.  This means all subsequent emails from that address are now marked as "junk" or SPAM. 

The solution is to create a Safe Senders entity for Zotmail by right clicking on the message and under Junk Email add it to your Safe Senders list. 

For additional information on Zotmail vist UC Irvine Zotmails »