While the struggle against unsolicited email is never ending, RUCS is committed to the fight. On an average day, Rockhurst receives over 600,000 external emails per day, of which less than 3% are considered legitimate, not taking into account ones that are not captured by our protection systems and must be manually deleted by our users.

Not only is SPAM a massive inconvenience to our users, it also spreads malicious content that can damage our infrastructure or expose our users personal information. It also wastes network bandwidth and taxes resources that should be used for more legitimate purposes. 

Currently the three major ways we block SPAM & malware are:

• At our gateway, using our Barracuda SPAM firewall.
• On our mail systems, utilizing server-side protection software.
• At our clients, using Outlook's built in Junk Mail filter and McAfee Anti-Virus.

This weekend we will be activating another layer of protection. This layer, known as "in the cloud filtering" by our Internet service provider, will help block SPAM closer to its source before it ever reaches our network. Not only will this change help reduce the SPAM, it should free up significant resources on our network. The result should be faster and more reliable email delivery as well as a faster Internet connection for the campus.

We will never stop all the SPAM. As fast as our filters can adapt to new threats, the threats adapt to the filters. Our hope is that our users begin seeing significant improvement this week. Any SPAM system is prone to false-positives, if you feel that legitimate emails are being blocked by this change, please contact us immediately.

Update April 17: Mail delivery from some servers may have been delayed over the last week as we've implemented this change. We apologize for the delay, however, at this time everything should be fully operational and our external message traffic on the network has already reduced by 95%. Users should be seeing a significant decrease in spam at this time.