How can I deal with phishing and spam email?

The amount of spam you receive depends on your Spamability quotient (SQ)

• If you have your email address on any websites your SQ goes up as these are culled by spammers
• If you participate in discussions groups or list servers your SQ goes up for the same reason
• If you have given out your email address to any surveys or to access a website or register for or purchase something your SQ goes up
• If you ever respond to SPAM or to the 'reply to be removed from spam list' request your SQ goes way up
• If you follow links in a Spam message your SQ will go up as this just confirms your email address

A normal range of spam is 0-30 per week depending on your SQ

• Don't give out your email address automatically (this includes paper comment cards or questionnaires)
• Check websites privacy policies before submitting your email address online. Find out how your address is going to be used and protected
• Be aware of options that are selected by default when installing software or completing online forms
• Use Email filters to block addresses, or tag suspect email
• Don't follow the links in spam messages
• Disable the automatic downloading of graphics in HTML email. Graphics in spam are often linked to track who opens the message (which confirms the address as active)
• Consider using an additional email address to be used for online shopping and completing forms. Any spam generated by these activities would then go to this secondary address, and not to your regular mailbox. There are a number of free email services available (Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail).

If you receive a suspicious email you can forward it to the IT Service Desk as an attachment for evaluation.

1. Select the email in the message list.

2. On the main Outlook Ribbon, select More > Forward as attachment.
   

3. Send to ithelp@viu.ca

Instructions for attaching a message in Webmail

Barracuda is a mail-filtering program that runs on the email server. All incoming email is scanned by the Barracuda before being delivered to your inbox. The Barracuda performs a virus scan on all attachments, and attempts to identify common patterns that match with known spamming and phishing techniques. Based on the findings, a score is applied to each email. Should the score get too high, the email’s subject is prepended with “[Suspected Spam]”, or if the score is higher, the email is quarantined in a special inbox on the Barracuda itself. You’re notified of this by an email every day at 1:00 pm. And finally, if the score is extremely high, the email is rejected altogether.

Please note that IT is planning on taking more steps in order to help prevent the amount of spam that we regularly receive. Putting a new spam filter in place is a great way to handle this and we are also looking at other solutions to help you identify spam and phishing emails that you receive, nevertheless, diligence is the best tool that we can all use.

Every mailbox has its own quarantine inbox. Messages believed to be spam or undesirable are stored here and are held until you release them. Quarantined messages are automatically removed after 30 days if no action is taken.

You can manage your spam settings and check your quarantine by going to https://spam.viu.ca/. You can log in with your email address and your VIU password.

You will receive an email every day at 1:00pm if you have new items in your quarantine inbox.

• Spam emails are unsolicited, undesirable email. They can often be programmatically identified and, as such, either blocked or tagged. For emails that are tagged as spam, you will see [Suspected Spam] prepended to the subject line.
• Quarantined emails are different. A quarantine is used to temporarily store emails that the spam filter suspects are spam. The quarantine system will notify you of
  new messages and provide you with a link for logging in to your Quarantine Inbox so you can determine if the message is spam or if it is valid. You can choose to deliver it to your mailbox or simply ignore it.

This is very likely because you don’t have anything in your Quarantine Inbox. The Barracuda Email Security Gateway will only create a Quarantine Inbox if you have quarantined items.

You can examine the emails in your Quarantine Inbox and decide what to do with them:

• Deliver will send the email to your inbox.
• Spam and Not Spam will help the anti-spam server learn about the specific message and improve it's filtering in the future. Selecting Not Spam will also deliver the email to your inbox.
• Delete will permanently remove the email from your Quarantine Inbox

Reminder: E-mails in your Quarantine Inbox will automatically be deleted after 30 days

If there are any emails in the inbox, the barracuda will send a notification. This notification email will have a link in it which can be used to access the quarantine inbox without a password.

You will only receive an email if there are items in the quarantine that need to be actioned. If no action is taken on these items, they will be deleted after 30 days. The notification emails are sent to the inbox in question, e.g. department@viu.ca

If you do not have a quarantine notification e-mail handy you can follow the steps below to generate a password to login to the shared mailbox's quarantine:

1. Go to https://spam.viu.ca/
2. Enter the generic mailboxes e-mail address into the 'Username' field
3. Click 'Create New Password'
4. An e-mail from "Barracuda Email Security Gateway (no-reply@barracuda.viu.ca) with the subject "User Quarantine Account Information" will be sent to the generic mailbox with a password in it
5. Go back to https://spam.viu.ca/ and login with the generic mailboxes e-mail address and the password from the e-mail to access it's quarantine

Note: This password is ONLY for the mailboxes quarantine and will not work in any other system at VIU.

By default, you will receive an email every day at 1:00pm if you have new items in your quarantine inbox. This can be changed to weekly or disabled entirely.

To change this:

Unfortunately there was no way to import those lists. They will need to be recreated. You can start creating new lists by logging into https://spam.viu.ca/ and clicking on the PREFERENCES tab. Then click on the Allow list/Block list to get started.

Spam is a finicky, fussy and tricky problem. After deploying the new spam filter, we will be working to tune it over time so we can eliminate as much undesirable email as possible.