ITS recently implemented new protections into Drake’s email system, designed to guard against phishing attacks that have targeted faculty, staff, and students. This tool scans incoming external emails and detects malicious links and attachments, blocking them before they can reach our mailboxes. What’s your experience with it so far? Do you have any questions or concerns? Contact informationsecurity@drake.edu and let us know.
—Peter Lundstedt, Information Security Manager
I already submitted a ticket last week and received some feedback. Whatever you installed is not working particularly well. Here is what I noticed:
1) Stuff gets moved to “junk” that obviously is not junk. This includes senders from Drake, some of whom I have exchanged many, many, many emails with in the past. Even today’s “On Campus” message was labeled as junk!
2) The junk-mail filter seems to be untrainable. It doesn’t help to mark the emails as “not junk” or have the sender in my “Contacts”.
3) On the other hand, lots of stuff that is junk gets through just fine without being flagged.
4) We (several people from my group) had (at least) one email rejected that never made it anywhere. It came from a group organizing a conference in Russia, but I had email exchanges with that group in the past. Once again — that didn’t help. Fortunately, one of my group members frequently uses a Yahoo rather than this Drake email address. That’s how we knew about this email.
5) I just my preferences so that things are kept in my Inbox, rather than being put into Junk automatically. At least that way I don’t have to check my junk mail as regularly as my Inbox.
Looking at the text of your message, item 4) is particularly critical and worrying. I have this uneasy feeling that things are getting rejected (“… blocking them before they can reach our mailboxes”) that should not. The above message from Russia was actually quite important, and it would have been pretty much a disaster if we hadn’t known about it.
I realize that junk mail and fishing attempts are a serious problem. Nevertheless, there is a lot of room for improvement — to say it mildly!