IT - Email

Spam Filtering

North Central University equipment examines all incoming email and blocks or quarantines messages that are determined to be spam. Because filtering techniques occasionally block legitimate messages, spam quarantine is used. The quarantine saves messages which are likely to be spam for at least 3 days and up to 20 days, allowing the intended recipient to review them. Unless the recipient authorizes the quarantine to deliver a message that is held, the message will be deleted. North Central email users can manage their quarantined messages and customize filtering for their account using the Email Quarantine section of Unet.

Quarantine Details:

  • A list of your quarantined messages is emailed to you each day.
  • Logging in to the quarantine allows quarantined messages to be deleted or delivered
  • Messages can be classified as Spam or Not Spam which improves the ability of the filter to determine which messages are or are not spam
  • A custom whitelist is available. Mail sent from addresses or domains in this list will bypass most spam filtering rules.
  • A custom blacklist is available. Mail sent from email addresses or domains in this list will never be delivered to you. Warning: Email users are fully responsible for all mail lost due to custom blacklisting.
  • If you do not want to use the quarantine, it can be disabled through the web interface. It is also possible to disable spam filtering for your account.

The spam quarantine is accessible through Unet. Before logging in, you must select whether you are a student or employee.

Full instructions for use of the quarantine are available here: http://www.barracudanetworks.com/ns/downloads/barracuda_usersguide.pdf

Student Email

North Central University provides e-mail to all students. The student email system may be used for personal and school related messages. North Central University prohibits use of the student email system for spamming or other student run businesses.

The web interface can be found at http://mail.northcentral.edu. Your email address is typically <firstname>.<lastname>@mail.northcentral.edu. Passwords will be delivered to new student NCU postal mail boxes, and new passwords for returning students may be requested at IT if needed. You can access your email in 3 ways: the web interface, POP3, and IMAP, and you can send mail using SMTP. If you want to use an email client to access your email using POP3 or IMAP, use mail.northcentral.edu as the server name for either method. Please note, we can only support the web interface because of the wide variety email clients. To send mail from your email client, use mail.northcentral.edu as the SMTP server and authenticate using <firstname>.<lastname> from your email address and your password. Also note, no SMTP will be allowed to be sent from campus except through mail.northcentral.edu. Many recent viruses send SMTP directly, so we have chosen to block all un-authenticated email from our campus network in an effort to keep this kind of virus from spreading using our campus Internet connection.

Please click here for our Tutorial and How-to pages for more information. 

Off-Campus Employee Email Access

Please click here for our Tutorial and How-to pages for more information. 

Email Safety Tips

The vast majority of computer viruses alive in the world today travel from one computer to another as email attachments. This means that if you ever get an email attachment that you were not expecting you should not open it without first saving the file and scanning it for viruses.

When receiving email attachments, beware of any files whose names end in the following extensions:

.pif .exe .com .bat .vbs

Any of these file types may be carrying viruses which can wipe out the contents of your computer and destroy North Central property. There are other viral file types but these are the most common.