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How many email messages does SU send and receive on an average day (during a
semester)?
150-200k received each day during semester....85% of which is SPAM (Blocked),
3% is SPAM (Tagged) 10-20k sent per day
How many email accounts does SU have?
17,500+ This number is so high due to generic accounts, duplicate accounts
(someone having student AND faculty/staff accounts), and also our retention
policy for student accounts (15,900 student accounts), we basically keep 6 years
plus of student accounts .
What percentage of this is SPAM?
Probably close to 90%....88% is either blocked or tagged...a small
amount gets through.
Why do I still get SPAM when I know some SPAM is blocked. Some is even
labeled SPAM.
No solution is 100%, even at 99% accuracy...1% getting through out of 200k
messages is 2,000 messages.
Can't we just eliminate SPAM?
No. It is impossible. Even defining what is SPAM for one person and what is
SPAM for another is difficult. Also SPAMmers are always changing tactics and
they have access to the same tools that we use for blocking so they are always
learning ways around the filters.
I hear that students don't use campus email, is this true?
Yes and no. Compared to the number of student accounts only a very small
number of students are logged into the Post Offices at any given time. A lot of
students forward their GroupWise e-mail on to outside accounts (i.e. gmail,
hotmail, yahoo etc. ). GroupWise e-mail is the official means of communication
to students for financial and academic information so they always need to have
access to it, and to use it either directly or indirectly (through forwarding
rules).
How come we occasionally see announcements from SU faculty/staff about
everything from church suppers to community fundraisers?
The reason we get them is because faculty and staff can spam the campus using
established email groups. Students do not have access to these groups. These
types of mailings are generally best suited to the campus-bulletin or eSU news.
Some universities require prior approval for individual campus-wide messages and
others limit the sending of campus-wide mail to a few accounts. We generally
just deal with issues on a case-by-case basis, reminding people of the digest
and eSU news as alternate outlets, and also reminding people of the proper ways
to send campus mailings: proofread before sending rather than re-sending to
correct typos or incorrect info, BC'ing (blind copy) the distribution lists
(EVERYONE_ groups), and also setting the messages to expire when possible.
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