[UCE] Filtering

Dear Customer

Redstone has been working closely with our education customers to understand what issues are affecting schools and how Redstone can further enhance the service provided.

It has been identified that the major issue affecting schools is the amount of UCE (unsolicited commercial email), commonly known as SPAM mail received by schools. These emails are a nuisance and the filtering of them manually by the customer is resource intensive and takes a user away from their normal tasks.

I am pleased to announce that Redstone has undertaken to apply a new service to the email platform. As well as the Anti-virus and Becta Accredited content filtering already in place, from w/c 3rd July each mail received by Redstone will also be checked against a UCE filter. This filter will identify and re-route all mail designated as UCE to a Redstone server and it will not be delivered to customer mailboxes.

In order to ensure that no legitimate email is incorrectly identified as UCE, the filtering will initially carry out the checks at a moderate setting, this will apply the filter to all mail that is identified as being 95% or more certainty of being UCE. This has, during testing correctly filtered out over 80% of all UCE mail with no legitimate mail being blocked. This will give customers a significant reduction in the amount of UCE mail received.

All mail designated as being between 80 – 95% certainty of being UCE will have its subject line prefixed with the words [UCE] and will be delivered as normal to customers. Customers may find that legitimate mail is tagged in this way but should be assured that these mails will be processed as normal and this prefix is only an indication of the content based on the filtering software. Customers who receive a prefixed mail and do not know who the sender is should treat the mail as suspect and should exercise caution when opening the mail or any attachment.

Redstone will review the level of filtering after studying the mails that have been filtered to ascertain whether a more aggressive level of filtering can be applied.

Please note that this filtering applies only to UCE / SPAM email, should customers have subscribed their email addresses to mailing lists they will continue to receive these emails and it is up the customer to unsubscribe their email address from these mailing lists if the service is no longer required.

Redstone is providing this service as a free of charge enhancement to existing customer services.

Should you have any queries or concerns regarding this enhancement, please respond to ispsupport@redstone.co.uk.

Yours sincerely

David Farmer
Network Support Manager
Redstone Managed Solutions