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SFA's Meridius Spam Quarantine Service Info

SFA is pleased to announce our new spam filtering service called Meridius. This new service will help SFA students, faculty, and Staff deal with the ever increasing amount of unsolicited commercial e-mail that fills our inboxes and causes slow access to our e-mail. It will also provide another level of virus protection for our computers. This page will provide you with an introduction to that service and discuss the features and functions therein. If you have any problems using this service, please use the help request form. If you have a comment about this service, please use the comment form.

A Brief Overview
All e-mail coming into SFA's main e-mail servers, Titan and SFAADM, will pass through this service meaning this e-mail will be subject to spam and virus monitoring. Departments who have their own e-mail server may also choose to have their e-mail funneled through Meridius. E-mail leaving SFA will not be checked at this time. Anything suspected to be spam will be held in an account for you. You will be notified when you have new e-mail quarantined for you via an e-mail message. If you have your SFA e-mail forwarded to another address, these notifications will be forwarded to that address. These notifications will not be sent immediately on receipt of new quarantined messages. These notices will be sent once a week at 6:00 am. You will only be sent a notification message if you have new quarantined messages since you were last notified.

Messages held for you in this account will remain for 21 days and then automatically be deleted. (The number of days may vary based on the time of year. Watch mySFA for announcements.) This means it is up to you to check your quarantined e-mail for any important messages. It is very important for you to check regularly during the first couple of months so that you can use the filter to allow messages from any important e-mail addresses through. (Click on the "Managing Your Filter" link below to learn more about filters.) Initially, you will have legitimate messages held as spam. Also be aware that some e-mail you consider to be spam will get through.

Also note that once you are logged in, help is available for every screen. Just click where you see .

For the purposes of this set of web pages, any reference to your e-mail address will be intended to refer to your SFA supplied e-mail address but not to any personal e-mail address you may have.

With the addition of the Meridius Spam filter and the firewall, if you access the Internet from on-campus dorms or if you access the Internet from off-campus, you may experience problems when sending e-mail. To determine if you will be affected and, if so, how to avoid the problem, please click here.


How it works:

The Meridius Security Gateway appliance uses a sophisticated spam detection engine that can prevent unsolicited email from getting through to your e-mail account. This built-in engine runs behind the scenes, performing a series of heuristic text analyses and Bayesian filtering of the header and body of each email message. These analyses result in a hit score of how likely it is that a message is spam. The higher the score, the greater the probability that the message is spam. For instance, a message containing the word “free” numerous times will be assigned a relatively high score.

Meridius also uses Recurrent Pattern Detection (RPD™) technology which detects and classifies recurrent patterns that are common to spam outbreaks, in real time. By detecting new recurrent spam patterns immediately, and maintaining a database of spam outbreaks, RPD immediately identifies spam by its volume and speed of distribution.

Questions or Comments: its-sysmgt@sfasu.edu

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