altecsole Posted July 7, 2005 Posted July 7, 2005 Starting in September we are going to give students school email via our Exchange 2000 box. Has anyone got any suggestions for plugins etc. for monitoring student email? In particular for offensive mails etc.
Dos_Box Posted July 7, 2005 Posted July 7, 2005 Make them use Outlook Web Access. It will save you alot of time and energy as all it involves is a shortcut on their desktops. This will also remove acess to features and address lists you don't want them to see.
Geoff Posted July 7, 2005 Posted July 7, 2005 This is a can of worms. Unless you've got the right clauses in your AUP your not allowed to monitor it. If you do, you can setup a user who has read access to all the mailboxes. Then you can connect to the exchange server as that user and browse all the inboxes and outboxes. I suppose exchange based antispam plugins would also be able to pick up offensive words, etc in emails but I very much doubt you'd be able to justify the cost of them. They are typically tens of thousands of pounds. The solution we have here uses a Linux box sat inbetween the exchange mail server and the rest of the world. It'll junk anything it thinks is spam. This includes most offensive stuff. It detects it as porn mostly. We do not do any manual monitoring, we don't have the manpower. Oh yes, all your efforts will be for nothing as soon as the little darlings discover GPG.
altecsole Posted July 7, 2005 Author Posted July 7, 2005 Make them use Outlook Web Access. It will save you alot of time and energy as all it involves is a shortcut on their desktops. This will also remove acess to features and address lists you don't want them to see. Yes, we've already setup Outlook Web Access for them. Thanks.
MkII Posted July 7, 2005 Posted July 7, 2005 ...something i'm very concerned about altecsole. [although i'm using open source solutions] I don't get why we don't have full access rights to students emails. Isn't it the same as any other student information we store - we have a duty of care to protect them while they are in our care - at school. What would happen if you had to delve into someones data stored on the system [anyone now] and it was encrypted - do the employers have the right to make the person give access to them?? just a-wonderin'
Geoff Posted July 7, 2005 Posted July 7, 2005 Again, I'll point out RIPA. If you've not put something in your Email AUP so that your users wave their rights your heading down a pit full of sharp pointy sticks at high speed. RIPA only applies to the Government and its agencies. That means schools.
MkII Posted July 7, 2005 Posted July 7, 2005 Ok - reading that Geoff - sorry for being a bit slow! :oops: You're really hot on this stuff huh!
Geoff Posted July 7, 2005 Posted July 7, 2005 I used to work for the Police. I got loads of training on RIPA/Human Rights/etc when the laws were passed.
MkII Posted July 7, 2005 Posted July 7, 2005 Ouch - my eyes hurt!!! so... I have to have consent to intercept communication - which I get by force by not giving access to the system without it. and... the law provides that if it were necessary to access encrypted data qualifying bods could demand it [now you can all sleep soundly - ok? ]
Geoff Posted July 7, 2005 Posted July 7, 2005 I have to have consent to intercept communication - which I get by force by not giving access to the system without it. Yes, like I said, you need something about email monitoring in your AUP. Presumably for both Staff and Pupils. Otherwise you have to trot off to the nearest judge for a search warrant every time.. the law provides that if it were necessary to access encrypted data qualifying bods could demand it They will likely demand the decryption key off the school if its an employee or off the childs parents if its a pupil. Faliure to do so gets you a nice jail sentence. If any staff are using any encryption you should make sure you have a copy of their private encryption keys...
ICTNUT Posted July 11, 2005 Posted July 11, 2005 Hi Geoff, As a Network Admin I have a duty to protect the students from various things that could fly in by email, SPAM, PORN, Etc but no-one yet has mentioned the bullying by email side of things. I does go on and we know this, how are we meant to do our jobs if, and I am not pointing at you Geoff, people keep sticking legislation in the way. I use a whole suite of products from GFI and thier Mail monitoring and security addins for exchange are second to none. These are automated monitoring of emails and no one actually looks at the emails unless one is flagged, and then only myself and one other has access. Does the automated monitoring of emails still require consent??
Geoff Posted July 11, 2005 Posted July 11, 2005 Does the automated monitoring of emails still require consent?? Probably.
russdev Posted July 12, 2005 Posted July 12, 2005 even automated monitoring i.e ones for spam etc would have thought it would be the same... also remeber if you have abillity to do it then you must inform them.... Our isp gives us ability to filter and monitor email etc we do not do as a rule but ability is there so we inform them we can and will and then problem solved. Russ
ConTheITGuy Posted July 12, 2005 Posted July 12, 2005 I use a whole suite of products from GFI and thier Mail monitoring and security addins for exchange are second to none. Would that be the freeware versions, or otherwise? Cheers, Andy.
Ric_ Posted July 12, 2005 Posted July 12, 2005 Just tell the users that you will be monitoring email and all activity on the ICT systems and that should cover you. Stick it in your AUP and then make them sign to say that they understand. I'm sure that we've been over this before. @ICTNUT: As for bullying, that is the main reason for monitoring email. Unfortunately we are not all able to afford MailEssentials so we just have to randomly check mailboxes when we have a spare 10 minutes or check the mail of those people that the teachers suspect or know are being bullied. FYI I also block access to webmail so that the little darlings are forced to use their school account - this means that they cannot be bullied by email in school without us being able to monitor it. It's then a matter for the parents to deal with at home since it is out of our control.
ICTNUT Posted July 12, 2005 Posted July 12, 2005 @Andy: We did start with the freeware versions (30 day trial) but you can up it to 60 days if you need to. We were very impressed with the way they worked and the low number of false positives it returned. It will take a while for you to configure (setup only takes 5 mins) but once it's up and running you pretty much don't know it's there, untill it lets you know it is ;-)
ConTheITGuy Posted July 12, 2005 Posted July 12, 2005 Cheers, Looking at the website, after the trial expires, you can still use a limited section of the software - I wondered if you just used this, or payed to keep the full product. Andy.
ICTNUT Posted July 12, 2005 Posted July 12, 2005 We opted to pay for the full software, but my advise would to use the limited freeware for a while and see if it does what you need and then possibly opt for the full product.
Heebeejeebee Posted July 3, 2008 Posted July 3, 2008 (edited) Make them use Outlook Web Access. It will save you alot of time and energy as all it involves is a shortcut on their desktops. This will also remove acess to features and address lists you don't want them to see. Can you stop groups of users from seeing certain GALs? The only way I've found to stop students from spamming the whole school is to disallow mail to the lists from specific user groups - they can still see them though. Using Ex2007 and OWA. @RIC_ Do you log in as random students or is there some other method for viewing email accounts? I've been asked to look into doing this but don't know of an easy way (AUP is being modified to accomodate this). HBJB Edited July 3, 2008 by Heebeejeebee
Busybub Posted July 4, 2008 Posted July 4, 2008 Has anyone got any suggestions for plugins etc. for monitoring student email? In particular for offensive mails etc. As Geoff mentioned, manpower is the issue when it comes to searching through student mailboxes. It's an absolute dog of a task... One way to simplify this is to set Exchange so that it forwards copies of every email to a specified mailbox (yours?). This makes it easier to scan email content for signs of abuse, but at the expense of effectively halving your storage capacity and taking up a good portion of your time when you check your mail! If I had a choice I'd get rid of student email entirely...
SpuffMonkey Posted July 7, 2008 Posted July 7, 2008 As Geoff mentioned, manpower is the issue when it comes to searching through student mailboxes. It's an absolute dog of a task... One way to simplify this is to set Exchange so that it forwards copies of every email to a specified mailbox (yours?). This makes it easier to scan email content for signs of abuse, but at the expense of effectively halving your storage capacity and taking up a good portion of your time when you check your mail! If I had a choice I'd get rid of student email entirely... Journalling is the thing for this - to a restricted account. We keep the last month's emails in a journalled account if they need to be examined - works for us - though as you say it yomps up the disk space.
Ben_Stanton Posted July 7, 2008 Posted July 7, 2008 We don't do monitoring as such, more content filtering. As already mentioned, we don't have the man power to traul through emails. I have simply setup a list of common 'offensive' words, typically swear words and the variations on them (sh1t etc etc). I am using Exchange 2007; EMC>Org Config>Hub Trans>Antispam>Content filtering Ben
SpuffMonkey Posted July 11, 2008 Posted July 11, 2008 Can anyone recommend decent and not too expensive filtering software for Exchange 2003 - to do roughly what the post above does?
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