Electronic Mail Standards

CIS provides central electronic mailbox services, with spam and virus filtering, and an @brown.edu email address. Following are the current standards for handling the inbound and outbound delivery of email through the central services.

Inbound Email

CIS systems scan inbound email for content that may be characterized as spam. Where spam characteristics are found, the message may be tagged or quarantined. CIS also routinely scans all email for viruses and other malware. The scanning for malware may also lead to a modification of email, or further consequences, as explained below.

Because of the potentially harmful nature of the content of many messages or attachments, CIS currently:

• Does not deliver messages containing attachments that have been identified as worms by our current anti-virus solution;
• Deletes attachments that are identified as containing viruses by our current anti-virus solution, and replaces them with a file called "deleted.txt";
• Blocks messages from external mailers that do not provide the proper identification per DNS. (Some spammers make use of improperly configured SMTP servers in an attempt to mask their true identity.)
• Blocks other incoming email that exhibits characteristics of spam, viruses, trojans, or anything else when it could threaten campus network infrastructure or services.

Brown's email services are configured to automatically limit the size of inbound messages to 10 MB (including attachments).

Outbound Email

• Messages up to 10 MB in size (including attachments) may be sent through Brown's email services.
• Outbound email will be scanned for viruses.

Related Policies and Procedures

Electronic Mail Policy | Procedures for Emergency Account and Information Access | Computing Policy home page

Questions or comments to: ITPolicy@brown.edu

Last revised: April 5, 2007