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ISG FAQ - Email
How can I send/receive files larger than 70 MB?
How do I add / remove a vacation message for my email?
How do I subscribe to CEE mailing lists?
How do we protect against email spam?
How is email processed here at CEE?
What types of email attachments are blocked?
Why am I not receiving email from a specific person?
Why am I receiving messages stating I am over my CEE Email Inbox limit?
Why am I receiving virus warnings regarding emails I did not send?
Why are the email messages I send to our mailing lists being held for moderator approval?
CEE has a file Upload feature that allows for the upload of files to CEE faculty/staff through a web interface.
This mechanism is intended to allow CEE faculty and staff to receive files from external users larger than the 70MB email limit
- Files larger than 250MB will be discarded
- Files containing spaces or special characters may not be accessible
- Files containing viruses will be deleted
- All uploaded files will be deleted after 7 days
You can create an email message that can be sent to people automatically when you are on vacation or away from your computer. This message is called an auto-reply or vacation message.
To create an automatic response to all email received when using CEE's Mail Server:
- Login to http:ceeinfo.cee.gatech.edu
- Click on Mail in the left pane
- Click on Vacation in the top pane
- Follow the instructions on the screen
To stop the automatic response to received email follow the same steps above, choosing instead to Unset a vacation message
To subscribe to an email distribution list please send an email to helpdesk@ce.gatech.edu detailing the list you would like to join, your email address and your advisor's contact information.
Generally speaking, all incoming email is processed using a software package called SpamAssassin.
The following actions are taken on all incoming email before the email connection is closed with the sending server - this allows the sender to know immediately if their email was not delivered
1) Attachments in the email are scanned for viruses. Any message triggering the antivirus software is rejected and the email is returned to the sender stating such. The virus definitions are updated every 30 minutes.
2) The email is processed by SpamAssassin - an open source spam detection package which utilizes a highly competent scoring system. Any email generating a level of 5 or higher is rejected and the email is returned to the sender stating such.
3) Emails containing password protected compressed files are rejected and the email is returned to the sender stating such. (This is done because such files cannot be scanned by the virus scanning software.)
4) The message is delivered to the user's mailbox.
This system has proven to be highly effective in
a) reliably stopping a majority of spam emails from being delivered to the user with an extremely low false positive rate
and
b) keeping email borne viruses and unscrupulous attachments from reaching the user.
Emails with attachments that have the following extensions are rejected and the email is returned to the sender stating such:
exe, com, cmd, bat, pif, scr, sct, lnk, dll, ocx, dot, pot, vbs, vbe, vb, sh, shb, shs, hta, pl, pm, hlp, chm, wsc, wsh, wsf, ade, adp, js, jse, mda, mdb, mde, mdw, msi, msp, reg, asd, cil, asx, cpl, wsz, wms, wmz, wmd, zip (when password protected)
There are a couple possible causes for email to not be delivered to you from a specific person.
The first possibility to check is to ensure that the person sending the email has and is using the correct email address. Any typographical error will prevent the message from being delivered.
The next most likely problem is that there is a server between the two users that is overloaded and the e-mail is simply delayed.
There is a small chance that our spam filtering software has incorrectly identified the message as spam and halted delivery.
If all of the other options have been explored, submit a Problem Report to ISG and we can try to trace down another cause.
Note: the blocklist have been removed from our configuration and are instead used in the scoring system employed by the spam filtering software.
To allow the CEE Email server to function optimally, ISG requests that your Inbox remain below 100 megabytes in size.
Keeping Inboxes below this threshold allows the server and network to process requests efficiently.
Due to the design of the IMAP protocol (the specification used by email clients), every time a user checks their email the entire Inbox file has to be downloaded and processed. Therein, multiply the number of CEE users by the potential size of their Inboxes and the networking infrastructure becomes consumed rapidly.
For comparison, OIT limits the campus email solution to 100 megabytes total (Inbox + personal mail folders). CEE limits the Inbox to 100 megabytes and allows personal mail folders to exist beyond this limitation.
Click here to learn how to create separate mail folders to store messages that need to be saved.
Click here to learn how to move messages to these separate mail folders
Many recent email viruses use a fake "From:" address causing virus notification messages sent from the recipient's virus scanner to go to the wrong person.
If you know that you did not send the email message, you can safely ignore these misdirected messages.
An updated page with additional information on viruses/worms that forge the From: address
- - - Email sent to CEE Faculty/Staff on September 9th, 2003 - - -
There has been a significant increase in the number of viruses being sent via email. Many modern viruses send copies of themselves automatically, usually without the knowledge of the person whose computer is infected. Additionally, these viruses often forge the "From" address to disguise the actual sending computer, and they obtain email addresses from a variety of sources on infected computers.
If you receive a message stating that your computer is infected and a) you did not send the message in question or b) the virus listed is on the list below, you can safely ignore the warning and delete the notification message.
The following viruses/worms are known to forge the "From:" address:
Worm_SoBig
Worm_Nimda
Worm_Klez
Worm_Mimail
Worm_Yaha
Worm_BugBear/Tanatos
Worm_Lirva
W32/Braid@mm, W32/Braid.A-mm, I-Worm.Bridex, W32/Bridex.A@mm
However, if the anti-virus software on your machine reports you have a virus, please contact ISG immediately.
If you are a member of the CEE faculty or staff and have sent an email message that is being held it is because of one of several reasons.
-
You are sending a message to a list that you are not a member of. If you are a staff member you will not be on the faculty list and vise versa.
-
If you are sending to a list that you should be on then the most likely reason is your from: address is not configured correctly. The CEE and courses mailing lists are configured to accept messages from email addresses firstname.lastname@ce.gatech.edu . If your from: address is not configured that way in your email application it should be changed.
- It could be that you are not on the list even though you should be. If this is the case please submit a helpdesk request.
Documentation on changing your from: address for Outlook
Documentation on changing your from: address for Thunderbird
Documentation on changing your from: address in CEE webmail
The CEE email server uses an open source application called SpamAssassin to greatly reduce the number of spam messages delivered to user's Inboxes.
However, it is in the spam sender's best interest to write emails in such a way to defeat spam filters and some of the tricks they use are listed below; most likely, if you have received a spam message on the CEE email system the sender used one or more of these methods to defeat our filter
-
Use spacing between characters of a word (ie, mort g age). This allows the human reader to 'decipher' the message but reduces the the spam filters ability to detect it.
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Use a list of random, normal words to confuse the spam filter as to the actual content of the message. The inclusion of a set of random words either in the message or as an attachment causes the Bayesian filtering to become ineffective (this is called Bayesian poisoning)
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Including only links to the advertisement in the email. Using web links allows many email clients to display the entire email properly by fetching the web page automatically; but this removes the content from the actual email message and from the content processed by the spam filter.
- Forging the email headers of the message to make the email appear to come from a trusted source. Our configuration gives a negative begining score to any emails originated from trusted mail servers to ensure these messages are delivered. By using a forged trusted email server in the email message the probability of the message being stopped is reduced
Several of the rulesets used by SpamAssassin are community driven and updated frequently; CEE's mail server updates it's configurations based on these rulesets nightly.
While the CEE email server does take a proactive approach in reducing the amount of spam delivered to our user's it is not possible to create a spam free environment with the current unsecure protocol used by email. ISG is continually seeking ways to further reduce the number of spam emails delivered to our user's email accounts and we appreciate your patience as the we and the computer security community as a whole attempts to find more perfect solutions.
To see the current number of email messages processed by the CEE email server and the number of spam and virus laden messages stopped click here
If you use the CEEINFO/Webmail interface to read your email you can use the "Report as Spam" link on the top of the screen to improve our spam filters effectiveness.
