ITS is exploring approaches to enhance the University’s protection from spam emails.

The University email systems process approximately a million messages daily.  Over half of these are tagged as spam and their delivery blocked by our filtering devices.  Senders employ increasing sophisticated techniques, and unfortunately, some fraudulent messages make it past the filters.  When these are phishing messages, our community and their personal information is at risk.  ITS has been researching new cloud-hosted filtering products that may provide better protection.  To gauge effectiveness, we will be testing the products we are evaluating starting May 15 and continuing until June 30.  During this time, ITS will route emails sent to @uconn.edu addresses from outside our university network through the email filters that we are evaluating.  These services will not block any messages, but they will add information to the header (a portion you do not normally see) to reflect message categorization.  Messages will then be passed through our current, in house filters where they will either be delivered or blocked based on the criteria and logic that are in place today.  These tests should not disrupt or change email service, but ITS will actively monitor the service throughout our review, and we can quickly and easily discontinue the evaluation at any point.

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