The new spam blocker installed on UGAmail blocks e-mails promoting investment schemes and miracle drugs, but could be blocking urgent and legitimate e-mails.

Some UGAmail users have reported experiencing false positives with the blocker, installed in December. A false positive happens when spam-filtering programs block legitimate e-mails.

Amanda Wartner, a senior from Alpharetta, didn’t get an important e-mail when corresponding with prospective medical schools.

“I got an interview at the University of Alabama-Birmingham Medical School. They said they would e-mail me with more information, such as detailed directions, a week before the interview,” Wartner said. “When I still hadn’t received anything the day before the interview, I called, and they said they had sent the e-mail four days ago.”

Enterprise Information Technology Services is the group that provides technology support for the University and installed the spam blocker.

Managing UGAmail includes updating spam filtration, which according to Albert DeSimone, associate director of EITS, has become a huge problem – especially since 2006.

DeSimone recalled a Security Focus News article from October of 2006 that estimated a 450 percent increase in spam since February of that year.

The increase is due both to spam messages becoming more difficult to detect and also to an increase in the volume of spam.

Potential spam can go through three different detection processes before it ends up in a student’s inbox or junk mail folder – Realtime Block Lists, MailHurdle and an heuristics-based tool.

Realtime Block Lists are constantly revised records of spammers.

MailHurdle is a more complicated spam-blocking program that examines Internet servers.

The program reduces the amount of spam that gets through to UGAmail because the servers of spammers often are configured differently than most others.

Though most servers will resend a message after being temporarily rejected from a program such as MailHurdle, spam servers aren’t configured that way and will not resend the message, DeSimone said.

“The pros of the MailHurdle greylisting tool are that it eliminates about one million spam messages that would be received by UGA each day,” DeSimone said.

While he said that legitimate messages that do not get to UGAmail are a rare occurrence, some UGAmail users still are frustrated with e-mails not showing up in their UGAmail inboxes.

Janet Frick, an associate professor of psychology, said she has experienced inconveniences due to not receiving e-mails and knows that her colleagues and students have, as well.

“A journal editor asked me to review a manuscript that was attached to an e-mail that I never received,” Frick said. “It could have been a big professional embarrassment had I not called.”

Frick said she feels very strongly about informing UGAmail users to possible problems like her own and made some recommendations to lower the risk of losing messages.

The first and easiest way for UGAmail users to catch lost messages is to check their junkmail. E-mails from URLs such as America Online and Hotmail are often mistaken for junkmail, Frick said.

People also should be aware that many problems arise from people forwarding their UGAmail to a different address. UGAmail will not forward anything that is suspected of being spam, Frick said.

People who forward their UGAmail to a Gmail account, such as Frick and Wartner, seem to be especially prone to this problem.

Frick said it is also important to look out for attachments and international e-mails, which some UGAmail users have lost when forwarding their mail to different addresses.

DeSimone also stressed that these difficulties are not unique to UGAmail. There is no e-mail program that does not experience problems with false positives, he said. However, if any UGAmail user would like to stop all spam filtration to avoid a possible lost e-mail, this will be an option when the next version of UGAmail is released this spring.

If you think that a message has not been delivered to your UGAmail account, you can call the EITS desk at (706)542-3106.