Campus Technology Services began using the Barracuda Networks system to filter unwanted, phishing and scam emails from campus members’ inboxes.
Christopher Craig, network engineer at Campus Technology Services, said the system was put in place to make it easier for students to see the most important information in their email inboxes and have any questionable emails quarantined in a completely separate digital location.
“The portion of Barracuda that we use is a filter that allows some measure of control over the junk mail that students and employees get,” Craig said.
Craig said due to the high costs of filtering programs, Campus Technology Services has manually filtered emails for the past few years. He said this year, the team had the budget to invest in the Barracuda Networks software. Craig said the task of separating individual emails from the inbox of each student is an unrealistic and tedious assignment. In recent years, that was the job of one of the Campus Tech professionals.
Barracuda’s system advertises to be the industry-leading spam and virus defense for email. The program separates questionable emails based on a combination of factors, one of which is keywords.
“These systems are usually structured to target words within emails,” Craig said, “It can be as simple as blacklisting a word like ‘kindly.’ It’s based on the number of scam emails that tend to have that word in them.”
Craig said this system allows them to release the unwanted emails into a different folder, so the user can decide whether to keep them or not.
“It’s not a perfect system, and if you notice quarantined emails that you would actually like to have in your inbox, then click ‘whitelist’ so that you can keep receiving emails from that source,” Craig said.
Arissa Brown, music theater sophomore, said the Barracuda program has made sifting through her emails harder. Though the system is in place to protect students, Brown said it also quarantines other important emails with information regarding subjects like Greek Life events or scholarship opportunities.
“Personally, I despise Barracuda. I’m in several outside organizations, and often I find that instead of the system helping fish out scams, it actually filters out the emails from those organizations,” Brown said.
Brown said the program has also accidentally blacklisted certain professors’ emails. Though most professors use their OCU accounts, she said several of them also communicate through alternate emails, which get quarantined and don’t reach their students.
“Another issue I find is that they don’t send the quarantine email for a few days. Sometimes it’s a very important message that you don’t get to see in time because the system is flawed,” Brown said.
As a student with a full school and work schedule, Brown said this is a very frustrating part of using Barracuda.
“There’s always a spam folder. I’d really rather just use that,” Brown said.
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