Email Services @ Brown

CIS provides email services to every member of the Brown community, faculty, staff, and students. In addition to these centrally provided services, many departments maintain local mail services for use by members of their own departments. This document details the services provided by CIS in the storage, retrieval, sending, and receiving of email. For information on departmental services, see departmental system administrators.

Standards

Because email services are provided to a campus population of approximately 15,000, there are some limitations on use.

Quotas

Students are given 50 megabytes of space on the central mail servers, and faculty and staff are given 200 megabytes.

Message Size

Message size is limited to about 10 megabytes. That means email sent out, whether from Brown or to Brown or both, cannot be larger than 10 megs. Should you attempt to send something larger than that you should get an error message back before it goes out telling you the message size is too large. A message addressed to you from outside of Brown that is too large should bounce back to the sender telling him or her that the message size is too large.

Addressing

All email sent to people at Brown should be addressed to firstname_lastname@brown.edu. That will ensure that the email is sent to the appropriate mailbox for that individual. Each individual can set where his or her Brown.edu email is sent to by setting their email delivery location in myAccount.

There is no limitation at this time on the number of recipients who can be addressed in an email message.

Services

Mail Delivery

The Exchange 2003 server provides central mail services for campus, providing MAPI, IMAP and POP delivery. In addition to these central services, several departments on campus have their own local mail delivery services, and many members of the Brown community have their Brown addressed email delivered to non-Brown accounts. This is done through the myAccount program.

Mail Sending

Email being sent out by members of the Brown community from on campus should use the server mail-relay.brown.edu for SMTP. Those who are using email from off campus will need to use a web-based email client, or use an SMTP server provided by the ISP that is being used to connect to the Internet.

Virus Scanning

All email messages addressed to Brown University email addresses or sent through mail-relay.brown.edu to addresses outside of Brown are scanned for viruses. The email passes through a McAfee anti-virus gateway, which monitors attachments for viruses in all incoming email addressed to @brown.edu, and all outgoing mail from clients using mail-relay.brown.edu. It attempts to clean infected files, dropping them before the files even arrive in your email box.

If an attachment can't be scrubbed, you will get the email message anyway, which will contain a footer notification of the attached virus's removal. Most likely, email that you receive with this notification is not legitimate email and is, in actuality, a virus delivery. Viruses that are dropped without delivery include: Beagle, Klez, Mydoom, Netsky, Sobig and Swen.

Alternate Email Addresses

Within the myAccount program, it is possible to set for yourself up to four(4) additional email addresses. These can be used as variants of your name or for specific business purposes. These addresses are unique and specific to the holder, which assures that email is delivered to the chosen alternate address(es). More details about alternate addresses, including limitations of the service can be found within the myAccount screens.

Spam Filtering

CIS has introduced a program called Proofpoint to allow you to remove spam from your email before you have to look at it. This service scans incoming email for certain key phrases and behaviors (messages written in all caps, for example), and uses that information to give each email a numerical score. If the score is higher than a certain threshold, the email is tagged with a special header. You could then set up a filter in your email client to direct those messages to a different mailbox, or even direct them to be deleted completely. That way, spam can be removed from the email that you use to do work.

Directory

Brown's directory service is an electronic version of the paper phone directory with a few enhancements. The primary one with regards to email is that email addresses for members of the Brown community are listed along with their phone numbers. All email addresses in the directory are of the form firstnam_lastname@brown.edu. Where that email is actually sent to is covered in the addressing section above.

Related Document

Electronic Mail Policy