Spam setting changes backfire for university e-mail accounts

Last semester, senior finance major Jennifer Maurer nearly missed the deadline for renewing the lease to her South Campus Commons apartment, but not because she forgot.

Every e-mail Commons management sent went straight to her university e-mail account's junk mail folder.

Over the summer, the Office of Information Technology changed its spam filter settings to include umd.edu e-mail addresses. OIT officials say the change has made the university e-mail accounts more resilient against ever-evolving spammers, but students complain of missed messages from professors, their jobs and even ticket notifications.

E-mails from all these sources were marked as spam.

"I started forwarding all my UMD stuff to Gmail because the UMD account gives you such little space and I got sick of always having to clear out the inbox," Maurer said. "But the spam doesn't get forwarded to Gmail and sometimes important stuff ends up in the spam so I never remember to go check my UMD spam folder and then I miss out on important things."

OIT decided to update the spam filter settings in July because they realized spammers' had wised up to the point of using umd.edu addresses to flood inboxes with bogus messages.

"We are trying to find a balance between allowing legitimate e-mail and blocking spam in an environment where spammers are constantly analyzing how we allow legitimate e-mail to get through, and we are constantly fighting that ongoing battle against spam," OIT's Director of Communications Phyllis Johnson said. "We noticed increased spam over the summer, and we therefore increased our efforts to fight spam."

But with OIT's new attempts to filter spam, e-mails such as ticket notifications are  getting stuck in students' spam folders. And some students still face problems even if they've caught the problem once.

"Almost all of my UMD ticket notifications go to junk mail even after I move a previous one from the same address to my inbox," senior family studies major  Kelly Ringer said. "I just forgot that the basketball game [last week] was happening so I never requested a ticket. I missed out on loyalty points."

Johnson said that notifications for athletic events do not come from a university server, so sometimes they get filtered into spam.

"We will continue working with those on campus who use external e-mail services to improve the deliverability of external e-mail that could look like spam to our university spam filters," Johnson said. "Our goal is to be able to deliver every legitimate e-mail message, but that is not an easy task."

Nonetheless, the losses of important e-mails because of spam filters have made some students switch their primary accounts to their Gmail or Yahoo addresses instead.

Senior math major Matt Mercogliano, who recently began forwarding his messages to his Gmail address, said he thought OIT should be more careful about filtering mail from university departments.

"I think OIT should be more proactive with what e-mails it accepts," Mercogliano said. "For different departments, it should communicate with different people to ensure that e-mails are not automatically put into the bulk folder. What happened with the Athletics Department can happen to any department that sends e-mails to many recipients."

Johnson said that it is impossible to filter certain messages and not others, but that OIT is still trying to streamline its spam-fighting process.

"None of these actions are perfect," Johnson said. "No matter what, you will likely still receive some spam in your inbox. It is also possible that some legitimate e-mails from your colleagues, professors and friends will be mistakenly filtered as spam and put in your junk mail folder."

cetrone at umdbk dot com