click here for a sample welcome email sent to new members

What is the Message Center?

To prevent unwanted messages from reaching your email inbox, the Message Center filters all incoming email for spam, phishing *, and virus-infected messages. Legitimate messages are delivered to your inbox as usual, but unwanted and potentially harmful messages are diverted and quarantined at your Message Center.

[* Phishing is e-mail fraud where legitimate-looking e-mails attempt to gather personal and financial information by asking the recipient to click on the included link.]

You can visit your Message Center to review and retrieve quarantined messages by logging in using Firefox, Internet Explorer, or any standard browser.

You will also receive a weekly quarantine summary email that lists recently quarantined messages and includes a convenient link to the Message Center.  Messages that are left in the Message Center will be deleted after 14 days.

Logging into the Message Center

1. In any web browser (i.e., Firefox or Internet Explorer), go to https://spamcheck.brynmawr.edu

Bookmark to this location in your web browser, or select the link to the Message Center in your quarantine summary email notification.

1. Log in using your email address (jdoe@brynmawr.edu) and password.

What Can I Do In The Message Center?

You can review quarantined, messages, and deliver any valid messages that were falsely quarantined to your inbox. You will also be able to:

∙Adjust your junk mail filters from lenient to aggressive

∙ Allow or block individual senders, domains (for example: whitehouse.gov), and mail lists

∙ View your personal email aliases (additional addresses where you also receive email)

What Should I Do First?

When you first log in to the Message Center, you arrive at the Junk tab.

This lists all messages that were not delivered to your inbox.

Review Quarantined Junk Email

When the Message Center first begins to quarantine your suspicious messages, review messages on your Junk tab for a few days to be sure valid messages aren’t falsely quarantined. Messages are listed in ascending order of their likelihood to be spam, to help you locate any false positives. You can click on a column header to sort based on date, who the message is from, or its subject.

Click a message’s subject in Message Center to view its contents. In the unlikely event that you find a valid message you want to retrieve, click its corresponding deliver button to deliver it to your inbox.

You can also select “Why Was This Message Quarantined?” to find more detail on the reason Message Center quarantined the message.

Explore Your Personal Settings

Click the Settings link at the top right of any page to see the personal preferences available for you to manage.

Review Online Help

For complete details on using the Message Center, click the Help (?)  button at the top right of each page for help on that specific page. Or click the button next to a set of controls, for details about just those controls.

The Quarantine Summary Email

As a convenience, the Message Center will email you a weekly notification listing all messages that have been recently quarantined. This allows you to quickly scan quarantined messages without having to visit the Message Center. This quarantine summary email also provides a link to the Message Center, in case you want to view a quarantined message. You will be able to:

∙ Deliver messages from your junk quarantine to your inbox (click the corresponding deliver link in the email)

∙ Click a message’s subject link to review its content before delivering it

∙ View a list of recently quarantined messages

Note: Messages that are not delivered via the Deliver link will be maintained in Message Center for 14 days, after which they will be deleted.

Tips for Using the Message Center:

If you receive too much junk email

This email protection service blocks 95 percent of unwanted mail, allowing only a few junk messages to reach your inbox. If more unwanted mail than that is getting through:

∙ Adjust your filters to a more aggressive setting. Then visit the Message Center regularly for a few days to verify that valid messages aren’t being quarantined

∙ If any other email addresses forward mail to your account, make sure these addresses are not on your approved senders list

If valid messages are quarantined

If too many valid messages are quarantined as junk mail:

∙ Adjust your junk email filters to a more lenient setting

∙ Add senders whose messages are regularly getting blocked to your approved senders list

When to Use Sender Lists

Message Center enables you to allow or block messages from individual senders, mail lists, or entire domains (for example whitehouse.gov).

There are a few cases when sender lists are useful:

∙ Add senders to your approved senders list if messages from them resemble junk email and have been falsely quarantined

∙ If you belong to a mailing list or newsgroup where different members email each other using the same TO address, you can put that TO address on your approved mail list

Warning: Don’t add your own address to the approved mail list. If you do, all messages sent to your address bypass junk filters, allowing all junk email to reach your inbox!

Note: If you require that a particular sender be approved for delivery to all Bryn Mawr recipients, please contact the Help Desk.  Upon approval, the sender will be added to the globally approved list.

Can I safely view contents of quarantined messages?

Yes. Message Center allows for viewing without the risk of executing malicious code. Clicking a message’s subject link to read it does not transfer the message to your inbox, so you can safely view contents.

For details on using junk email filters and sender lists:

1. Locate the control in Message Center under Settings.

2. Click the corresponding Help (?) button of junk email at the Message Center

How are messages identified as junk?

Before any message reaches your inbox, the service evaluates it

for spam-like content, and gives it a score indicating its probability for being junk mail. The service compares this score with tolerance levels set by your filters, and messages exceeding this tolerance are quarantined in the Message Center.

What happens if legitimate email is rejected or quarantined?

There are two ways that email is rejected. Some spam is rejected before it reaches the Message Center. Senders of those emails will receive a message explaining why their email was rejected, and who they should contact if they were falsely identified.

Messages that are suspected, but with a lower certainty, of being spam are stored in your Message Center.  Senders of those emails will *not* be notified of their status. Since the sender isn’t notified it is especially important that you check the weekly email summary. Diligent quarantine checking will prevent legitimate messages from being deleted. As stated earlier, after 14 days messages are deleted from the Message Center.

I am an affiliate, how does that affect my use of message center?

If you are an affiliate you still benefit from Message Center filtering, but do not receive a Message Center console.  Message Center will still block the most blatant spam messages from reaching your mailbox.

How is my privacy protected?

All scanning and filtering is done automatically, in a matter of milliseconds, so no one actually reads your messages. Only you and approved IS personnel have access to your quarantined email. However, it’s rare for a valid message to get quarantined. In addition, while quarantined messages are maintained on an external server for 14 days, those that are delivered simply pass through Message Center without any of their content being preserved by the external server.