July 29, 2002
Starting Monday, Aug 5th, we will begin filtering viruses from all incoming emails to deas.harvard.edu. If someone sends you an email containing a virus, the sender will receive an auto-reply message, including the subject line of the message, stating that the email was infected and asking them to resend a clean version.
In addition, we will begin to run our spam (electronic junk mail) filtering software. For the next couple of months we will simply mark all potential spam messages with ***SPAM*** in the subject line. If you receive a message thus marked that is NOT spam, please notify us by forwarding the message to spamnot@deas.harvard.edu. We hope to have our spam filtering perfected and functioning in October. After October all spam will be intercepted at the server and only delivered to you, the user, if you wish to receive it.
August 6, 2002
After a slight delay for further testing, SPAM marking and virus filtering will begin this afternoon at approximately 4:30 pm.
The system sends all mail addressed to user@deas.harvard.edu through a relay server. The relay server will mark most junk mail with **SPAM** in the subject. We have chosen a low level filter to reduce the number of good messages wrongly marked as spam. Because of this there will be some mail that is spam that is not marked.
The relay server will block mail with viruses. The sender will be notified that the message was infected and not delivered. The recipient will not be notified but the message will be kept of the server for a few days.
Most of the virus laden mail we have seen recently has headers forged by the Klez virus. Because of this you may get email occasionally saying that a virus was found in mail you did not send. Just ignore such messages. We hope to eliminate them in a future release of this service.