PlanetUSF

Welcome to my Blog! It took me about 4hrs to be able to override the sender notification because it wouldn’t let me do anything! But thanks to my pal Alex, we figured it out that my norton antivirus was blocking it all!

We’re getting a lot of questions about spam, so I thought I’d go over what we are doing about the problem.

Please be aware that the following information is for @mail.usf.edu accounts only. If you have an @eng.usf.edu or @stpt.usf.edu account you can use WebMail, but none of these anti-spam features are available to you.

The Problem

By now everyone has heard of, and received spam, so I’m not going to explain what it is, but I want to give you some perspective on the size of the problem we are dealing with. We receive around 300,000 email messages on an average day and we’ve had peaks of over 500,000 per day. That’s a lot of mail, and scanning each message for viruses and spam is very CPU-intensive. Spam scanning is especially hard, because of the nearly-infinite variations that spams come in, thousands of tests have to be run on each message. Up until now, scanning was done on the mail server itself, just before the message was placed in your mailbox. This was sufficient when the mail server was put into production back in 2004, but we were only receiving about 1ooK messages per day then. In order for the mail server to handle the increased workload since then, we’ve had to cut down on the number of tests that we used to scan for spam, which limited the effectiveness of the filters.

The Solution

Just before Fall semester, we moved to a different architecture: the scanning is done on a separate set of machines (called MailGate) which then hand the messages to the mail server for final delivery. The new system is working really well, and with your help (more on that later), it will get even better. However it is not perfect. Some spam will still get through, but it will make a huge difference in the amount of spam you receive. MailGate reduces the number of spams you receive in a couple of ways:

Blacklisting

The first step in combating spam happens before a message has even been transferred. When an Email server tries to contact MailGate to send a message, MailGate checks several blacklists and if the server is listed, the connection is denied and no mail is transferred. MailGate also denies access to badly mis-configured or non RFC-compliant mail servers, which are usually spam zombies.

Virus Scanning

At this point, MailGate looks at the message and determines what (if any) files are attached. All files that are executable on Windows (.exe, .bat, etc) are automatically rejected. We are doing this because most Email-borne viruses use these file formats. If you need to send an executable file for some reason, put it into a “zip” archive to get past this check. If the file is not an executable, it is sent to the virus scanner. All archived files are unpacked at this point and the contents are also scanned. If all of the contents are virus-free, the message is then ready for spam scanning.

Rules-Based Spam Scoring

We use SpamAssassin to determine if a message is spam. Spamassassin (SA) uses thousands of rules and text patterns to make this determination. In addition to SA’s built-in rules, we are also using sets of rules that are updated daily to detect the latest types of spam We are also using Razor and DCC which are massive spam databases that messages can be checked against. Each rule has a “spam score” associated with it and once the message has been tested against all of the rules, the message’s total score is added up. If this score is greater than 5.0 (this score may change at some point), the message is considered spam.

Bayesian Filtering

In addition to the rules-based spam scoring, SA also uses Bayesian Filtering to determine the spam score. I’m not going to go into all the details, but basically a bayesian filter “learns” what you think of as spam and non-spam (”ham” in SA terms). In order for a bayesian filter to work, however, you must train it. Here’s where you come in. You may not have noticed, but there is a new link in WebMail when you are reading a message: “Mark as Spam”. This link sends the message to MailGate’s bayesian filter to help train it to see that message as spam. There is a similar link ( “Mark as Non-Spam”) on every message in your SPAM folder which trains the filter to look for Non-Spam. Whenever the spam filter misses a spam message, make sure to mark the message as spam and whenever it mistakenly marks valid mail as spam, make sure to mark it as non-spam.

Delivery

Once all of these filters are run, the message is finally sent to mail.usf.edu for delivery. If you have spam filtering enabled, messages marked as spam by MailGate will be moved into your SPAM folder, if not, the message is delivered to your mailbox as usual. Again, this will NOT catch every spam! For me, it’s catching about 97% right now and with more training, it should get over 99% of the spam.

To make sure that you have the spam filtering enabled:

1. Login to WebMail
2. Click on Options
3. Click on Spam Filtering
4. Choose the destination for your spam
5. Click on Update Spam Filter Action

in just two minutes!
Here’s another Podcast lesson/activity to consider.
Listen to Lend Me Your Ears Podcast-Get What You Want

Haven’t been blogging because I shouldn’t be on the computer. Sitting is agony and guess I deserve it after a weekend of high-heel wearing for nearly 23 hours. The Rising Tide conference was awesome and I have a lot to post, perhaps later when I am sneaking in some laptop time from my bed and in between icepacks. At least this time the back spasm hasn’t affected my walking ability; however, it’s a drag to not be able to workout or do the work necessary for the first week of the Fall semester!

Til later, here are some links I wanted to share that cross many categories:

New Orleans jazzes anew by Poppy Z Brite in the Boston Globe

How life has changed since I left library school

Facebook - The Complete Biography

And no I didn’t miss the irony of having a painful back spasm yesterday, the anniversary of Katrina.

Today myUSF experienced a system outage caused by a hardware failure. The servers went down around 1 pm and some users may have experienced some loss of functionality beginning around 12:30 pm. The system was fully restored with no data loss at 3:30 pm for a maximum downtime of 3 hours. Thank you for you patience during this time. If you have any questions please contact myusf@acomp.usf.edu.

Here comes some pix of the first few days of this semester

Read this in the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago Website FRBC:

Here’s an interesting item to use to kickstart discussion about trade. The Adam Smith Institute has a bracelet supporting free trade . It touts “I buy goods from poorer countries.”
I suspect it would create an interesting back and forth with many students. (Are the people in those countries better/worse off producing goods for the world market? What is the impact on people in this country who could produce the goods? What do we learn from comparative advantage?)

I wonder if one of those bumperstickers is next (you know the half-loop ones in pink for Breast Cancer, yellow of POWs) ? BTW, the bracelets are free and can be ordered from their website (link above).

I hope everyone plans to watch the game this Saturday, the football team will need the support, went on a low note last year ( only semi-low I should say ) but we will do better this year.

Now that we know what to expect we can prepare, just be sure to support the team.

There was an unscheduled outage of service on mail.usf.edu from roughly 1AM to 7AM on 8/30/2006. The root cause of this failure is still being determined, but the impact was that Webmail, POP, and IMAP services were unavailable during that time period. Thanks to our new spam/virus scanning system, all incoming mail was received, scanned, and delivered to your account once the system was operational again, so no mail was lost. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.

Ok so this is my blog. It’s for usf which is cool. Classes just started yesterday. I enjoy most of them. All except my ethics class but yet, it just started so it could get better. I am getting more used to it all. I still miss home but I’m making this place more and more home. I still miss my babygirl. I keep checking my mail but nothing yet. Hopefully i will get one soon. Right now thats all i have to post but i’ll post more later.
Alex

Podcast number two, on Choice, has been recorded and is awaiting the final tweaking. But instead of having time to do my GarageBand edit, I’ve spent a good portion of the past several days driving in endless circles looking for a place to park!!! It’s the first week of the USF’s fall semester and the traffic on campus has been a real bear! So faculty and students alike are spending “discretionary time” doing laps and trolling for parking! It’s a lot like the musical chairs activity I mentioned in the Scarcity podcast - only with real-world application! Yikes, it really is always about economics!
Bottom line: the Choice Podcast is coming this week.

You may already know that one of the most efficient way of connecting to the library databases and electronic journals from off-campus is through myUSF (aka Blackboard). Once logged in, there is a tab called “Libraries”.

Well, that tab is now sporting a direct link to the Lakeland Library Services page making connecting to our library webpages a little more direct and less confusing.

Southeastern Students:

Download this file, shade in the cells where you have class or work, and save the file as firstname_lastname.xls. That’s your first and last name. Then email me the file.

Download here

The Center for 21st Century Teaching Excellence (C21TE) at the University of South Florida was established to promote personal reflection and scholarly dialogue on the art, science, and craft of university teaching. The Center sponsors publications, workshops, and research which critically examine and promote instructional excellence. In addition, the Center offers opportunities for individuals to improve their teaching effectiveness using classroom visitations and/or mid-semester student feedback. To learn more about the Center visit - http://www.c21te.usf.edu

This blog will present information related to C21TE activities. Some examples include:
1. Workshop Updates
2. Event Updates
3. Instructional Techonology Tips
4. Information relating to enhancing teaching and learning
5. Elluminate (synchronous virtual classroom) information including classroom scheduling

Do keep visiting as the information updates regularly.

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