Yesterday at around 9:30 am GWAVA (the program we use to detect spam and viruses) began tagging voice mail messages as spam for some people.  This occurred because someone incorrectly put a lot of voice mail messages in the Spam folder. At 2:30 p.m. members of ITS staff noted that approximately 100 voice mail messages had been tagged as spam.  The issue was fixed.

 

At 7:30 am this morning ITS tried to release the improperly tagged email messages back to their respective user's inbox, but GWAVA would not let us do this.  At 8:15 AM we called the GWAVA tech support to assist us with releasing the wrongly tagged voice mails for you, in the process of fixing this issue another (more serious) problem happened.  At 8:30 AM we were rebuilding part of the GWAVA application, a rather routine process, and when we tried to launch the program it no longer would process external email.  The GWAVA engineers were able to pinpoint the problem by 10:30 AM; a single file had become corrupted during the rebuild process.  The GWAVA engineers sent us a new file, which we immediately installed, and the GWAVA application was again processing all email by 10:40 AM.

 

If you were one of the user's that had a voice mail tagged as spam it would have come across in the GWAVA digest that we send out daily at 6:00 AM and 2:00 PM, please check your digest to see if the GWAVA system has incorrectly tagged one of your email messages as spam. 

 

As a side effect of the many diagnostic steps taken while fixing the issue this morning the GWAVA application will not be as accurate until it has had a chance to relearn what this College considers spam and what it considers legit email.  Expect a few more false positives for the next couple of days and please be patient if you receive a few more spams messages, we will get the system back and running better than ever before.  You do not need to worry about the system tagging voice mails as spam any longer as we have put exceptions in place that will prevent this from occurring again. 

 

Many people have volunteered to help us detect spam.  However, we are noticing some problems as our volunteers are marking items as spam when they are not really spam.  All voice mail messages are not spam so please do not place them in the Spam Folder.  Also, if you opt-in to a service such as Orbitz, do not place that in the Spam Folder as it will affect other users.  If you no longer wish to receive emails from Orbitz opt-out.  Only spam should be placed in the Spam folder.  Spam is unsolicited email that is sent out in bulk. 

 

If you don't know what is spam think of it as having many of the same characteristics of the lunch meat Spam (suggested by the computer group at USC ) and (yes, I am dating myself):