ProofPoint Update

As part of our testing of the Proofpoint antispam appliance over that
past week, all incoming mail messages have been scanned by Proofpoint
and assigned a spam score. Our observations have shown the spam scores
to be very accurate, especially those that are assigned the highest
score of 100. Shortly after 5:00 pm this evening, we began diverting
all incoming messages with a spam score equal to 100 to a quarantine
area. They will be held there for 14 days before being automatically
deleted by the system. We believe that the false positives in this
range will be near zero. We expect that this first step will result in
a significant decrease in the volume of spam that hits your inbox.

We are still working with the vendor to correct two persistent problems
that were induced by the installation of Proofpoint. We are seeing some
significant delays up to several hours in the delivery of some messages,
especially those being sent from outside of our domain. Some of that
problem may be aggravated by the volume of mail being passed to our
incoming mail handlers. The steps described in the first paragraph
should ease the pressure on those servers.

The other problem involves our list server. Currently, mail sent to our
list server from outside of our domain is being bounced with and error.
We are still working with the vendor to find a suitable solution.

Once we solve those two issues, we will focus on fine tuning the system
so that we can increase the level of our spam filtering. We will also be
working on the configuration of the quarantine system so that you will
have individual control over how your spam messages are handled. We plan
to have training and documentation available when we roll out that
portion of the system.

We will update you periodically on our progress.

Dennis Schmidt

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Dennis A. Schmidt, MS, CISSP
Director, Office of Information Systems
HIPAA Security Officer, School of Medicine
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
76 MacNider Hall, CB#7045
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-7045
voice: 919 966-9900, fax: 966-6923