DICT Helpdesk

What does DICT do?

Measures against spam and phishing

What measures do we take?
Do senders get a warning?
Why is the delivery of external emails delayed?
Why is the message delivery to a UGent address refused?
Why is my email not sent?
Can email get lost?
What do I do with wrongly marked email?

1. What measures do we take?

Control of the reported phishing
Sending a response to known phishing messages is blocked so that account info (username, password, ...) cannot be passed on.
Blocking bogus websites

All email is checked for viruses and spam:

Viruses will not be sent to the user.
Active spam runs are blocked.
Email identified as spam gets the label [SPAM] in the subject of the message.
You can avoid getting [SPAM] mails in your inbox by setting a filter rule. E.g. in webmail.
In the 'Exchange' environment (Junk) e-mail filtering is active by default.

The UGent system consists of two components:

First line
We try to stop SPAM:
- we adhere strictly to the smtp protocol definition
- we use greylisting.
- we use e-mail throttling: the number of messages allowed from one IP address or user is set. If the IP address or user sends more messages, these will have to wait, or they will get a spam score.
- by using Spamhaus and SURBL lists
Second line
Next we check the content of the remaining messages, using SpamAssassin. Messages which are recognized as spam are removed. Messages which could be spam get the [SPAM] label.

2. Do senders get a warning when their mail is marked as spam?

If the email was stopped in the first line, a bounce message is sent.
If the email was labeled in the second line, UGent does not send a warning to the sender.

3. Why is the delivery of external emails delayed?

When a sender sends too many messages to a UGent address or sends them too quickly, the delivery will be delayed.

4. Why is the message delivery to a UGent address refused?

You are trying to send an e-mail to a UGent address and get a "Delivery not authorized, message refused" message. Why?
The most efficient and cheapest of anti-spam measures is to demand that senders (servers) follow the rules in sending email. Please contact your system administrator for further analysis. The system administrator can contact helpdesk@ugent.be.

To prevent spam from being sent, restrictions are set. The implications of these depend on your role.

End user: UGent users, using smtp.UGent.be or smtprelay.UGent.be as outgoing mail server.
Administrator: for administrators of a mailserver outside the UGent domain.

5. Why is my email not sent?

Cf.: FAQ (in Dutch)

6. Can email get lost?

Email may get lost in exceptional cases:

when experiencing a server crash
when the email contains a virus
when email which is not spam is considered to be spam.

In all other cases the email or an error message will reach the addressee:

email that has been labeled erroneously, is delivered with the label [SPAM] in the subject of the message.
You can report messages that have been labeled erroneously.
the sender does not follow the rules in sending email and is refused.
Undelivered e-mail can be retrieved from the sender.

7. What do I do with wrongly marked email?

Cf.: Report spam ("false negative") and No spam? ("false positive")

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