A new anti-spam system has been implemented by ITS to address the ever increasing problem of spam. The new system is a Spam/Virus Protection appliance by Barracuda Networks. ITS will be continually evaluating and adjusting the settings to match it to our university environment.
Any spam detected by this system will be delivered to your "Junk E-mail" folder in your Outlook/MavMail account. Spam messages in your "Junk E-mail" folder that are older than three weeks are automatically moved to your "Deleted Items" folder. Any message containing a virus will be deleted.
This is a very robust anti-spam solution that allows for many individual settings. ITS is trying to identify the most optimal settings for our environment that meets the needs of the majority of our user base. If you find these settings do not meet your individual needs you can adjust them by following these instructions. Most people will not have a need to adjust the settings.
Login with official e-mail address and MavMAIL password. Your official e-mail address is typically your firstname.lastname@mnsu.edu. If you are not sure what your official e-mail address is you can look it up on the E-account Management website.
By clicking on the Preferences tab and clicking on Whitelist/Blacklist bar you can view e-mail addresses and e-mail domains that you have whitelisted or blacklisted.
Adding an e-mail address to your whitelist can be done by typing the e-mail or domain in the box marked "Allow Email Addresses and Domains (Whitelist)" and click the "Add" button. You can also block e-mail addresses by typing the e-mail address or domain in the "Blocked Email Addresses and Domains (Blacklist)" box. 
Clicking on the Preferences tab and then on Spam Settings tab will allow you to adjust your spam filtering options. If you would like all messages delivered without being scanned for spam you can set the "Enable Spam Filtering" to No. If you would like to modify the default settings, set the "Use System Defaults" value to No and click on the Save Changes button.
Tag score allows you to set the score at which an e-mail is tagged for spam. As e-mail messages arrive the Barracuda filtering system will calculate a score for each message. A lower score indicates that it is a lower likelihood of being spam where a higher number indicates that it is a higher likelihood of being spam. If too many legitimate messages or false positives messages are being moved to your "Junk E-mail" folder then set the "Tag Score" to a higher value. If too many spam messages are being delivered to your "Inbox" folder, then set the "Tag Score" to a lower value.
The Quarantine Inbox is not used by default with our setup because we deliver the spam messages to your "Junk E-mail" folder. To enable "Quarantine Inbox" set the "Quarantine Score" to anything lower than 10. If "Quarantine Inbox" is enabled, a digest message will be sent to you when a message gets quarantined. Messages in the quarantine inbox will only remain there for 14 days before they are deleted.
Adjusting the "Block Score" will change what messages are rejected. Messages at or above this value will NOT be delivered to your Junk E-mail folder - they will be discarded. These messages cannot be recovered.
A plug-in can be downloaded for all versions of Microsoft Outlook that provides automatic whitelisting capablities. This plug-in also allows messages to be classified as "Spam" or "Not Spam" for setting up your personal Bayesian spam filter.
This plug-in will whitelist:
To classify a message in Outlook click on the red envelope ('X' mark) for spam or the green envelope ('Check' mark) for not-spam. This should only be done on e-mail messges received from off-campus addresses. Before your personal Bayesian filter is actived, 200 messages must be classified as "Spam" and 200 messages must be classified as "Not Spam".
Please contact the Help Desk at (507)389-6654 if you need assistance.
