New E-mail Filtering System Launched

Effective immediately, we are replacing the College’s overwhelmed email filtering system with a new solution named BorderWare Security Platform. This system will handle all in and outbound email filtering for the campus. This change has been hastened by ongoing serious problems with the reliability and efficiency of our previous solution. The College receives more than 2,000,000 email messages each day, 95% of which are spam!

This change will be largely invisible to most users. Similar to the old system, you will have 2 methods for reviewing quarantined email messages and taking appropriate action (junk/not spam, modify your list of trusted and blocked senders):

  • Open and check the quarantined email summary report that is sent to you each day or
  • Log in at https://bqs.cofc.edu using your email address (e.g., DoeJ@cofc.edu) and network password.

Because the BorderWare system uses a completely different method to identify spam, we will not be able to reuse any custom settings or whitelists that you may have created in the previous system. Due to the improved technology, it is less likely that such customization will be needed. However, should you want to review any customizations you set in the old system, they will be available at https://mail1.cofc.edu until January 31, 2009.

A brief user guide is available in PDF format.