Information Services

As the semester draws to a close, it’s more than likely that your email inbox is piling up with more information and emails than you can handle. However, not more than ever is the time when email maintenance is needed. An important thing to remember about DePauw’s email network is that the more email in the system, the slower the system will run. Being proactive with managing your inbox can help negate the slowness you may experience with Novell. Here are a few easy ways to keep your inbox under control.

Keep your Inbox clear. Your email will work faster if the Inbox has fewer messages in it. To maintain your inbox, it’s a good idea to set aside time in the day to deal with your email messages. If a message can be dealt with in a few minutes, do it and get it out of your inbox. You can also use other folders to organize messages. Keeping your email inbox clear will make it easier for you to find messages and you will likely be less overwhelmed about the amount of pending email that needs attention.

Empty the trash and sent items folders regularly. It’s not enough to just delete your emails because all items in your trash still take up the 50 MB of space that students receive. The system removes items older than 15 days old from trash automatically, but you can empty it more often if you have a lot of email that you delete. Sent items are easy to overlook, but they also take up space and are not as necessary to hold onto.

Unsubscribe to list services that you don’t use. It may have seemed like a good idea at the time to offer up your email address to get that extra discount at Barnes and Noble, but it’s likely that you probably don’t need to get weekly reminders anymore. It’s likely that everyone has subscribed to something at one point or another, but at some point, the messages have stopped being read and are now just deleted automatically. Take the time to read the message and follow the directions to unsubscribe from the list service. Cutting out these messages will drastically decrease the amount of weekly email you have coming through your inbox.

Use a different email service. Obviously your Tigermail account is necessary to function as a DePauw student, but it’s also a good idea to create an off-site email account (GMAIL, YAHOO, HOTMAIL, etc.) for personal or non-DePauw email. This will simplify your DePauw email box and help you separate your personal messages from your professional work messages.

Archive old messages. While there will be email that you will want to store, it’s likely that you do not need to keep this email in your inbox. You can help keep your inbox under the quota limit by archiving older messages.  To leran how to archive mail messages, follow the instructions here.

Contributed by Michael Gough, Instructional Technologist and Coordinator of START and Bernie Timberman, Senior Network and Systems Administrator

Spam is becoming more prevalent in the cyber community every day. Many viruses and identity thieves rely upon spam email to spread their schemes. Therefore, to prevent many viruses and possible spyware infections, DePauw has invested in two robust spam filters. These filters work very well, especially given the volume of emails that come into DePauw. However, it is not perfect and users should still scan attachments for viruses and spyware. Also, be careful when clicking on links in emails; many spammers use these links to take you to Web sites that can steal information from your computer.

The following offers a perspective of how much of our email really is spam, helps you understand how this system works, and give you an idea of how your contributions can assist our spam filter system.

DePauw uses two Barracuda Model 400 spam filters to trap spam, viruses, and Denial of Service attacks. Denial of Service attacks are email attacks that are designed to overwhelm an email server and deny its functionality for its users. Our filters are configured to update their spam and virus definitions hourly. This information is combined with known spam messages identified by the HelpDesk. Below is a graph from one of the filter’s recent performances.

Notice how only a very small fraction of the total is allowed to be delivered to the recipients’ email boxes. The spam filters actually have a 12 step defense layer and a load balancer equalizes the work between the two filters so that one of them is not overwhelmed with too much volume.

The last step (Spam Scoring) is modified daily by the DePauw community. We input spam messages that are received by the HelpDesk from users to strengthen the spam filtering. Therefore, you can help our filters become more efficient by sending any spam that you recieve to the HelpDesk. This will help all computer users prevent viruses and cybercrime on DePauw’s campus.

Contributed by Dan Pfeifer, Chief Technology Officer
and Courtney Hime, ITAP Communications Consultant

Often on days when faculty, staff, and students feel e-mail is running behind, it is forgotten how much spam the University sifts through. Here are some monthly, daily, and hourly statistics about the amount of spam received by the Network Services Group.