TechTalk
Return to TechTalk home page.

Archive
Return to the TechTips Archive

Tired of e-mail spam?

You should be seeing fewer mortgage offers, financial advice, and requests for bogus account confirmations to your campus e-mail address! Information Systems has installed a software program called Sophos PureMessage that scans all incoming e-mail to Wake Forest addresses for viruses and spam. E-mails containing viruses are immediately deleted (whew!). E-mail messages that look like spam are stored in your very own quarantine, instead of filling your inbox!

Here's how it works:

1. If the e-mail is not a virus, it is scanned by our filters and tagged with a spam score from 0-100.

2. If the e-mail’s spam score is between 96 and 100 , the e-mail is deleted because it is definitely spam.

3. If the e-mail’s spam score is between 50 and 95 it is quarantined for two weeks then automatically deleted. You can control your quarantine online at http://puremessage.wfu.edu in the following ways:

• Extend the time a message is quarantined
• Block a sender so that you never receive mail from that address
• Unblock a sender so that you always receive mail from that address

4. If the e-mail’s spam score is 49 or less the e-mail is delivered to your mailbox.

HAVE QUESTIONS?

Read our PureMessage FAQ,
download the complete users guide (pdf),or print a quick reference card.

Read more about PureMessage in this Wake Forest News Service story,
or read the Old Gold & Black story.