& Dear Faculty, Students and Staff:

As you all know, we recently experienced a massive “spam attack” on our CC email servers. This attack caused the email delays, slow-downs and delivery/receipt issues we experienced several weeks ago. The Network Systems and Services team has been able to set things right in the short term, but more attacks in the future are a serious concern.

We have a spam filtering service for CC email called Postini. CC has paid for this valuable service for all of its members since the 2000-01 academic year. Currently, only 30% of all faculty, students, and staff are taking advantage of it. Because of the threat that another spam attack poses to our email infrastructure, and because our email infrastructure is critical for CC operations, we* have decided that all faculty, student, and staff email accounts will be signed up for Postini services by default. This will affect all current and new CC email accounts. [*Note: The “we” is an IT staff recommendation, coordinated and supported by Senior Staff, Staff Council, and the ITAL Board. We also informed and welcomed feedback from the FEC and CCCA].

Postini’s spam filtering is wonderful for many “quality of life” reasons, including:
· A dramatic reduction in spam hitting your Inbox.
· Less spam means fewer junk email messages filling your quota.
· Postini allows you to set the “level” of the filtering (Bulk, sexually explicit, get rich quick, special too-good-to-be-true offers, and racially insensitive messages can be filtered differentially along a 5-point lenient-to-aggressive continuum).
· Postini allows you to add “approved” or “blocked” senders easily, in addition to its regular filtering.
· Postini catches and quarantines virus-laden email before it hits your Inbox.
· Postini holds the email that has been filtered as spam for 14 days. You can confirm that these messages are indeed spam before they are deleted (or have the messages sent to your Inbox instead). It’s very rare that a “legitimate” email is mislabeled as spam, but it can happen. You can log into Postini online and set your mind at ease that email you really *do* want to receive has not been held up in “spam purgatory.”
· But just to be clear: Postini will automatically delete your spam after 14 days. You never have to log into Postini if you don’t want to (or unless you think a message may have been erroneously filtered).

If – for whatever reason – you do not want to have a spam filter set up for your email account, you are welcome to “opt out” at any time, and you can contact the Help Desk at helpdesk@coloradocollege.edu or 389-6449 to make that arrangement.

We plan to have all CC email accounts set up for Postini services by Friday, September 21, 2007.

If you have any questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to contact the following people:

Chad Schonewill – Help Desk Manager
cschonewill@coloradocollege.edu
389-6449

Marla Gerein – Director of Academic Technology Services
mgerein@coloradocollege.edu
389-6738

Kris Jones – Director of Information Technology Services
kris.jones@coloradocollege.edu
389-6251

Randy Stiles – Vice President for Information Management
randy.stiles@coloradocollege.edu
389-6250