EMBC Users - Email

[GrumbleDook]

shot - because this is sometimes used as an alternative to the 7 letter word c**shot ... should be a low score though.

 

I know the word list has been looked at before the move, and that it is still being looked at so any feedback you can give is appreciated.

[Edu-IT]

Who do I need to sing nicely to in order to get access? ;-)

[gonzodad]

check ur inbox

[synaesthesia]

I suspect it may be worth EMBC contacting the larger schools to ask if they want to be part of it - I suspect generally schools that would want access in the first place (or used the old Webroot system) may be happy to help out by using it and reporting problems as they go.

[Edu-IT]

My username isn't working. ;-)

 

Can you PM me the format of your username Syn?

[synaesthesia]

Done.

 

As for what's changed - seemingly far greater control, scheduled reports (scheduled to your taste/requirements) on quarantined/delayed/deleted emails etc, the dashboard home screen thingy is far more informative and gives you a great first-glance glimpse of what's going on. Seems generally more intuitive than Webroot.

[Edu-IT]

I'm in! Thanks Syn and thanks Gonzo!

[Edu-IT]

I think I'm too innocent to know the meanings of half of the words on this filtering list! Going to have to do some Urban Dictionary'ing tonight.

[synaesthesia]

Word of warning which EMBC may need to look at (if possible!)

 

If you manually process a quarantined email (i.e. pass through) it remains in quarantine. So if someone else goes to process emails, it could get passed through again and it will be sent/received again. The option to delete emails is greyed out and there's no way to otherwise mark them.

[gonzodad]

syn - i will pass onto the project team. that 'feature' may be by design !

[GrumbleDook]

I suspect it may be worth EMBC contacting the larger schools to ask if they want to be part of it - I suspect generally schools that would want access in the first place (or used the old Webroot system) may be happy to help out by using it and reporting problems as they go.

 

They have done ... we have 3 on Northants and there are others working on this too. I mentioned at the meeting yesterday that in Northants we have a list of schools who previously had access or have had a bespoke rule created just for their email domain and the majority are secondary schools. Some of these are domains which have had a rule or two added by the desk in the past though, so we are trying to be careful handing the details out in the future to make sure places really want them and it is not just a random teacher wanting to try something. One thing I would ask is if people can let the desk know of any changes to staff to make sure that the technical and administrative contacts in T2S are up to date too ... if you go directly to Synetrix that is ... (must remember there are other LAs involved!!!)

[synaesthesia]

Ah, that explains it - we updated ours with them ages ago and they never did do anything (via EMBC)

Will contact Synetrix in the morning.

[synaesthesia]

ARGH!

The search feature, nor the filter/rule features allow the use of square brackets - the most common way of sorting emails!

So for instance we have a lot of [keyword] subjecthere and searching all subjects of all emails for [keyword] brings up a hell of a lot of unrelated stuff - there is certainly no mentions of those keywords there.

So we have a lot of this being filtered heavily for "general spam" - no problem, just create a rule to pass anything with [keyword] through - but no! can't do it!

Emailing service desk now

 

 

** Edit, I had to manually pass this email through because it blocked me from emailing the service desk. Nice. Confidence being quickly lost! I have been positive though, we're more than happy to help them resolve these issues by reporting problems but with this amount of problems, I wonder if it will be better to request all filtering is disabled.

Edited September 21, 2011 by synaesthesia

[synaesthesia]

Obviously this is affecting ALL schools on this system regardless of whether they have access or not. I implore people to be VERY careful about checking if emails have sent, confirm via telephone if need be - unless I'm making a mountain out of a molehill there are *serious* problems.

 

 

 

Joy of joys. Most of these emails were being blocked by a self made anti-spam thingy. Apparently a majority of emails contained the phrase "Best Quality Drugs". Sure. Sure they did. Better still, on realising this I remove those anti-spam thingies. An hour ago. And they're still applying.

 

Time to go hunting for an anti-spam system of our own, I think.

Edited September 21, 2011 by synaesthesia

[GrumbleDook]

ARGH!

The search feature, nor the filter/rule features allow the use of square brackets - the most common way of sorting emails!

So for instance we have a lot of [keyword] subjecthere and searching all subjects of all emails for [keyword] brings up a hell of a lot of unrelated stuff - there is certainly no mentions of those keywords there.

So we have a lot of this being filtered heavily for "general spam" - no problem, just create a rule to pass anything with [keyword] through - but no! can't do it!

Emailing service desk now

 

 

** Edit, I had to manually pass this email through because it blocked me from emailing the service desk. Nice. Confidence being quickly lost! I have been positive though, we're more than happy to help them resolve these issues by reporting problems but with this amount of problems, I wonder if it will be better to request all filtering is disabled.

 

That won't happen ... for oh so many reasons, but the first being the brown stuff hitting the rotating thing after the first child gets an email asking if they want drugs / to increase the size of their appendage / to get anti-depressants because the surgery to increase the appendage didn't work / drugs to keep the appendage in a perky mood / materials to encourage the perkiness of aforesaid appendage / contact details of members of either gender who are willing to do the encouragement themselves or show you videos / pictures / stories about what they will do when in a perky mood.

 

Systems should always be fail-closed, whether on safety grounds or security grounds.

 

I'll check about square brackets as these are recognised characters that should be able to be included within a search.

[GrumbleDook]

Obviously this is affecting ALL schools on this system regardless of whether they have access or not. I implore people to be VERY careful about checking if emails have sent, confirm via telephone if need be - unless I'm making a mountain out of a molehill there are *serious* problems.

 

 

 

Joy of joys. Most of these emails were being blocked by a self made anti-spam thingy. Apparently a majority of emails contained the phrase "Best Quality Drugs". Sure. Sure they did. Better still, on realising this I remove those anti-spam thingies. An hour ago. And they're still applying.

 

Time to go hunting for an anti-spam system of our own, I think.

 

The systems is load balanced between multiple appliances. At the moment the changes made are replicated overnight to stop any sudden drop in performance whilst they look at and work on the system. This means that you might make a change right now but not see an effect until tomorrow ... This is definitely the case on the rules I have requested to be put in or tweaks for me.

[mats]

That won't happen ... for oh so many reasons, but the first being the brown stuff hitting the rotating thing after the first child gets an email asking if they want drugs / to increase the size of their appendage / to get anti-depressants because the surgery to increase the appendage didn't work / drugs to keep the appendage in a perky mood / materials to encourage the perkiness of aforesaid appendage / contact details of members of either gender who are willing to do the encouragement themselves or show you videos / pictures / stories about what they will do when in a perky mood.

 

Thing is, in a primary where the kids don't have email, the staff get quite cheesed off when their (work related) attachments get blocked and 3 letter swear words are found everywhere (in completely innocuous messages).

[synaesthesia]

With all due respect to the poor folks at EMBC getting the short end of the stick, this is nothing short of a joke. I will be spending most of today looking at in house systems, a majority of our staff are particularly upset and I've explained fully what the problem is to them. Many have asked about turning off the filtering for certain accounts, something I've already said I have asked to be looked at but will not under any circumstances be done globally for child protection reasons as the most important.

A lot of my time is being taken manually releasing emails currently and I'm now happy that I'm not making mountains out of molehills. I suspect the search critereon thing may be because it's sensitive/checks for regex stuff which probably isn't too wise for an email search, but hopefully fixable! Then again, once the binary file system is fixed it should allow searching of short terms within those square brackets to work without returning just about all emails.

I certainly think that whoever is responsible needs sacking! (please don't tell me it's you, Grumble! )

[synaesthesia]

Some more input from me - something I'm annoyed I didn't spot earlier.

It appears the translation of the rules from the last system to the new has gone a little iffy - for instance, choosing a nearly but not quite safe example:

Where "Camel Toe" appeared in the last system, it has gone through now as two separate rules

one for Camel

one for Toe

therefore you can see an obvious problem.

Just going through ours now to remove these, there are quite a lot of occurances.

[GrumbleDook]

Can you make sure that you document the changes and send them over to the project team? Actually ... can you copy me in as I am also interested in the list.

[synaesthesia]

I am having a conference call with the project team & a couple of others next week sometime - would have done it today but a bit busy and it gives me a chance to document things in a rather more orderly fashion. Will happily forward you in with any information.

[gonzodad]

guys - I've setup an open Q&A with the lead TDA for mailmarshall. it will take place sometime on Tuesday via a freephone conf call bridge. If you've been piloting the admin console and want to join the call please pm me and ill send you the details as we're really interested in your feedback.

 

looking forward to talking to you then synaesthesia.

gonz

[synaesthesia]

Ok guys, not sure I should relay this information rather than gonzodad but for everyone's benefit:

 

The Q&A was largely positive - there are known issues they are still working on however things have certainly improved.

The things that affect us as schools/things we need to look out for are as follows:

 

Scanning of binary files for badwords has largely improved - this is something I've seen over the last week especially. They say the last remaining big problem with this is PDFs created with varying programs which they are trying to narrow down. That's something we can live with I feel - I'm no longer having to manually release handfuls of emails per day.

 

Searching for things within square brackets is an ongoing one however searching for the text within the square brackets is no longer an issue, that would be down to the improvements in binary scanning. For instance searching for "sln" beforehand picked that up from just about all emails however the results now I have confirmed are pretty much spot on.

 

Documentation for the product has been sent out to the schools involved; however if you don't appear to have it then I'm sure gonzodad wouldn't begrudge a PM asking for it. The lack of documentation/my understanding led to about 3 hours of our emails being deleted straight away - quite happy to admit to making a mistake there.

 

Things are certainly looking up and looking good - as I said before the system is very flexible and powerful. MailMarshal are apparently very open to improvements and suggestions and welcome any feedback via the LA's/service providers involved; hence why EMBC have been happy with them so far.

 

It was good to listen to them explain the improvements - we know they've already been open about having problems due to the slightly rushed nature of it all but they will continue to improve based on school's findings. Feel free to post anything in here if it will aid other schools but make sure feedback goes through the right channels.

 

Thanks, Gonzodad - your input has been much appreciated. Hopefully you understand the frustration shown in the first few days back of term!

[Edu-IT]

As I mentioned to one of the guys working on this project, what drives me round the bend is not being able to delete the 'rubbish' from MM. Okay, I've seen that this is spam. I know it's there. Now I want rid! I don't want it showing in my search results each time and I don't want to have to remember what time I last checked so I can adjust the time filter.

 

It's one area of Webroot that was superior to this.

[gonzodad]

synaesthesia - thanks for posting the details, no problem at all. good talking to you.