Are you checking your quarantined messages?

By: John Dorner

About a month ago NCSU implemented Postini Email Archiving and Anti-Spam on all incoming and outgoing NCSU email.  Since then, each morning at about 6:00 you get an email message from NCSU with the subject "Quarantine Summary" and the date.  This message shows the subject and sender of all the messages that were quarantined the previous 24 hours. Although the subject line of many of these messages may be offensive, I'd recommend perusing the list very quickly to see if any desired messages are not getting incorrectly identified as spam - also known as 'false positives'. 

If you find any messages here that should have been delivered, you can click on the "Deliver" link and indicate that messages from this email address are not spam and should be delivered in the future.  This is more common for things like newsletters or groups that you subscribe to, but occasionally I have found messages from individuals in there.  I've noticed that as I've educated Postini about my preferences for which messages are not spam, I've gotten fewer false positives in my quarantine list.  Once I've gone a couple weeks without any false positives I will probably check it less often.  But, until then I'm going to keep looking at the quarantine list each morning.

IF I open a quarantined message, I do so with a very skeptical eye.  I'm extra cautious to look and make sure that the message is genuine and check it out very thoroughly before I click on any links or open any attachments.