Mail Marshal at ECU

   If the Mail Marshal has identified any of your incoming mail as spam, you will receive, once a day, a report like this:

    Just click on the link to the spammarshal and you will be transported to a page where you can manage your spam.  Before being allowed entry, you will be asked to provide your userid and password.  The home page will look like this:

• You can scroll through the listing of new spam, looking for anything that should not have been blocked.  If you find any such items, check the box to the left of each item and then click Unblock (which releases the item to your Inbox, after some delay) or Safe Sender (which releases the item and declares the sender of that item as safe, so email from that sender will not longer be blocked).
• Once you are satisfied that all of the remaining items are spam, check the box I've marked with an arrow in the image above.  This will select ALL of the items.  Then click Delete and they all are deleted.
• The Home page shows only NEW spam (that gathered since your last visit to the Marshal).  If you have not deleted all past spam there will some not displayed here.  Click on the Blocked Mail tab to see all of the spam.

    This page works pretty much like the home page, but it would allow you to deal separately with different sorts of spam (but does not, since our system is set up to put all blocked mail into the Spam folder).  Usually what I do, once I am satisfied that all there is spam, is just click the waste-basket (arrow pointing to it in image above) with "All Folders" selected, which will delete all of the items in the spam jail.

    Click on the Manage Senders tab to go here:

    Here you can manually add senders you wish to block or wish not be blocked.  For example, suppose emails from jffinch@ucla.edu were being blocked.  I simply enter that address in the space indicated in the upper right corner of the page, select "Allow this Sender," and click "Add."

Why Can't I Just Delete All of the Mail that the Marshal Arrests?

    You can, but that may not be wise.  You know, not everybody who is arrested is guilty of the crime, even though Republicans seem to think that is the case.  Likewise, Mail Marshal makes a few mistakes too, both false positives and false negatives.   It has come to my attention that many faculty are routinely deleting all mail which MailMarshal has detected as likely spam.  Allow me to explain why this is not recommended.   No spam filter is going to be 100% effective -- some spam will get through and some legitimate email will be incorrectly classified as spam.  If you do not scan your Mail Marshal folders for legitimate mail prior to deleting all mail, you may miss important email.  For example, suppose the Dean sends you an email about an important meeting he wants you to attend tomorrow.  He sends it from home, or on the road, using Outlook Express.  His ISP, like most, requires that he use their outgoing mail server rather than ECU's.  When his mail reaches ECU, MailMarshal notices that the header says it came from fechnerg@ECU.edu, but it did not originate from ECU's mail server.  That makes it suspicious, and it is segregated from the rest of your email.  You, thinking MailMarshal never has a false positive, delete all such segregated mail.  The next day you get an angry phone call from the Dean asking why you did not represent him in that very important meeting and did not even have the courtesy to reply to his emailed request.  Oooooooppppppssssss.

How Can I Prevent Mail Marshal From Blocking Mail That I Send From Home?

    As noted above, if you access your ECU email through the IMAP server, and your ISP requires that you use the ISP's outgoing mail server, your mail to ECU is likely to be arrested for suspicion of spam.  If the persons to whom you are sending this email have placed you on their safe senders list, the email should get through OK, but some of my colleagues have informed me that the Marshal does always respect such a "get out of jail" card.

    Suppose that you have two email accounts set up in Outlook Express on your home computer -- (1) one that retrieves email from ECU and sends email with your ECU address as the sender address, and (2) one that retrieves email from an account with your ISP and sends email with your ISP mail account address as the sender address.  If you use (2) rather than (1) your mail should get through to ECU recipients -- but replies from those recipients will not go to your ECU account (unless you configure your mailer to use your ECU address as the return address and your ISP account address as the sender address) and will not be put in your ECU Sent Items folder (although you can drag and drop such items from your other account sent items folder to the ECU sent items folder).

    Another alternative is just to use the web interface to ECU email.  When you send email using that interface, the outgoing email server is ECU's server, and your mail will not look suspicious to the Marshal.

    The best alternative, IMHO, is to use Outlook at home, after configuring it for Remote Procedure Call by Hypertext Transfer Protocol (RPC by HTTP).  In this way you will be dealing directly with the ECU mail server.

Blocked Outgoing Mail

   The Marshal also scans outgoing mail and then blocks mail that appears to be spam.  Here is an example of the sort of mail that has been treated as spam.  I sent this email on the 5^th of October, 2004:

From: Wuensch, Karl L
Sent: Tuesday, October 05, 2004 10:54 AM
Subject: Alternatives to Vioxx

You asked about alternatives to Vioxx.  I just got this from our state health plan: 

Vioxx is a COX-2, non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug.  Other available COX-2 agents are Celebrex (celecoxib) and Bextra (valdecoxib).  Other alternative treatments are ibuprofen and naproxen that are available over the counter.  Members should consult their health care provider to determine which alternative treatment is right for them.

    Shortly after sending this message, I received the following from Mail Marshal:

    Curious to see exactly what it was in this email which resulted in its being considered to be spam, I opened the attached log.  Here is the relevant information from that log:

 ------ Category <Outbound Spam> evaluation result ------
 CELEBREX: (60.00) Contains celebrex, possibly obscured
CONTTYPE_MULTI_ALT: (1.00) Content Type is multipart/alternative
HTTP_LINK: (3.00) HTTP link in message
MSG_SIZE_1: (1.00) IsBigger than 1K
MSG_SIZE_2: (1.00) IsBigger than 2K
MSG_SIZE_3: (1.00) IsBigger than 3K
TC_DRUG_CELEBREX: (14.00) Reference to Celebrex
VIOXX: (48.00) Contains vioxx, possibly obscured
X_MIME_OLE: (-1.00) X-MimeOLE: field present
Total score: (128.0) required(105.0)
SpamFilter: Version 44 27-Sep-2004
 

    Because the message concerned Celebrex, it earned 74 spam points.  Referring to Vioxx added another 48 spam points. This alone gave me122 spam points, putting me over the 105 point threshold for classification as spam.  It picked up a few additional points, for example, three points due to my signature containing a link to my home page.

   So, how do you unblock a piece of outgoing mail once Mail Marshal has classified it as spam.  It is easy, but not fast.  Just hit the reply key and send the notification email back to Mail Marshal.  In my experience, the blocked email will then be released in 5  to 150 minutes after you reply to the notification email.

    In April of 2005 I sent this same piece of mail again, just to see if it would still be blocked.  It was not blocked.  The folks down in the Cotanche building can fiddle with the Marshal's settings, and apparently they have fiddled with them in such a way that this message was no longer suspicious enough to be thrown in the slammer.

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This page most recently revised on 9. July 2009.