eCommunicator for Students

2006 Student Edition - Volume 2 > 'De-stressing' Main Mail Servers

'De-stressing' Main Mail Servers Radically Reduces Junk

March 28, 2006

If you think your job is stressful, imagine handling thousands of e-mail messages on a 24 x 7 schedule with no time off, as NU's main mail servers (casbah, hecky, lulu, and merle) do. Adding to the stress, some very determined spammers have been bombarding the servers with junk e-mail.

Fortunately, the E-mail Defense System (EDS) has been working just as hard. Over 2,000,000 pieces of junk e-mail have been quarantined each week since NUIT launched the EDS last fall, and more are being caught every day. If you need proof besides a noticeable lack of junk in your inbox, you can check your daily EDS quarantine digest. It's become much shorter, in many cases down from two or three dozen messages quarantined per user to fewer than ten.

If you don't read your quarantine digest, we recommend that you opt out of receiving it. Delivering fewer digest messages will lessen the load on the mail servers. To opt out, log into the E-mail Defense System and uncheck the box labeled "E-mail me the EDS Quarantine Digest, a daily notification of junk e-mail blocked by EDS."

Recently, NUIT took action to further de-stress the mail servers and keep things running smoothly:

All e-mail with an EDS junk probability rating greater than "99" is now deleted before reaching the servers, reducing the number of quarantined junk e-mail messages.
Anonymous off-campus LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) queries of the NU Online Directory are being blocked to help prevent the harvesting of northwestern.edu e-mail addresses by known spammers, which has contributed to the increase in junk e-mail.

When anonymous queries are allowed, the directory cannot tell whether an e-mail client such as Outlook, or harvesting software, is making the query. Users on the NU Network are allowed to perform anonymous LDAP queries, but this capability is not available from an off-campus IP address. Find more detailed information on NUIT's "Get Control" site.

Off-campus University users can use Virtual Private Network (VPN) to connect to the NU Network to enable access to the LDAP database.

To enable access to the LDAP database, and to ensure safe and secure access to all NU networked resources, use Virtual Private Network (VPN) when you connect to the NU Network from off-campus. If you need instructions for downloading and configuring VPN, visit Authenticating to the NU Network (VPN).

For details about NUIT's recent anti-junk mail initiatives, visit "What's New & Changing With Technology @ NU?"

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