Re: Email Forwarding

[Joel Rosenblatt <joel () COLUMBIA EDU>]

We support email forwarding on demand as a self service function.

Our email forwarding occurs after our spam filtering, which I would highly recommend as a good thing :-)

As far as "locally generated" spam, our policy is that all official communication from the University will come from and be sent to the University supplied 
email address - not reading your university email is not an excuse for not knowing something.

I have gotten requests to get off University email lists (for example, an email sent do all employees from HR about a HR issue) - my response to those is get 
another job - if you work for the University, you will get email from the University.

My 2 cents

Joel Rosenblatt

Joel Rosenblatt, Manager Network & Computer Security
Columbia Information Security Office (CISO)
Columbia University, 612 W 115th Street, NY, NY 10025 / 212 854 3033
http://www.columbia.edu/~joel
Public PGP key
http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x90BD740BCC7326C3



--On Friday, February 18, 2011 8:04 AM -0800 Joe St Sauver <joe () OREGON UOREGON EDU> wrote:

> Geoffrey mentioned:
>
> # At Wayne State we do allow forwarding, and this has indeed caused us grief on
> # occasion, but it's unlikely we'll turn it off any time soon. I maintain a blog
> # on internal IT-related things, and suggested, a few months ago, that we forbid
> # forwarding. You can  read the comments--they are instructive:
> #
> # http://blogs.wayne.edu/proftech/2010/are-you-part-of-the-problem/
>
> Looking at that article and comments, I'm seeing two key themes, I think:
>
> -- forwarding was causing problems for Wayne State because forwarding
>    was happening pre-filtering, and when spam was forwarded to third
>    party providers, and then reported by users, it was "charged" against
>    Wayne State, even though all you did was dutifully forward the user's
>    mail as they'd asked you to do
>
> -- some users preferred third party accounts because of things like
>    excessive amounts of "intra-spam" to which they'd been involuntarily
>    subscribed
>
> We dealt with the first issue in part here at UO by offering users the
> ability to forward AFTER spam filtering had happened (e.g., via
> procmail rather than via a traditional .forward file). That approach
> really knocks forwarded spam down to trivial levels, assuming you have
> an effective filtering solution in place.
>
> The second issue, intra-spam, is one that each site needs to wrestle
> with themselves, but I think policies that mandate either (a) confirmed
> opt-in lists only, or (b) approval by a designated very senior person
> (for rare involuntary everyone-gets-this-one-whether-they-want-it-or-not
> mailings) can do a lot to eliminate issues with unwanted intra-spam.
>
> Regards,
>
> Joe
>
> Disclaimer: all opinions strictly my own



Joel Rosenblatt, Manager Network & Computer Security
Columbia Information Security Office (CISO)
Columbia University, 612 W 115th Street, NY, NY 10025 / 212 854 3033
http://www.columbia.edu/~joel
Public PGP key
http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x90BD740BCC7326C3