E-Mail Saftey

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General E-Mail Safety Tips

  • Be suspicious of email attachments from unknown sources.
  • Verify that attachments have been sent by the author of the email. Newer viruses can send email messages that appear to be from people you know. This is known as "spoofing" a sender's address.
  • Do not respond to "phishing" e-mails.
  • Do not set your email program to "auto-run" attachments. For example, in Eudora leave "Warn me when I Launch a program from a message" checked in Tools/Options/Extra Warnings. Leave "Allow executables in HTML content" unchecked in Tools/Options/Viewing Mail.
  • Obtain all Microsoft security updates.
  • Update your anti-virus protection weekly.

E-Mail Filters at St. Edward's Prevent Most Virus Infected Attachments from Reaching Your E-Mail

Attachments with certain file extensions are discarded from St. Edward's E-Mail.
Each email that goes through an acad.stedwards.edu or admin.stedwards.edu account is filtered for unallowed attachments. These filters were placed on the acad.stedwards.edu and admin.stedwards.edu servers to catch potential virus attacks. This filter does not allow emails to be sent or received with attachments containing the following extensions:
.ade .adp .bas .bat .chm .cmd .com .cpl .crt .dbx .dll .eml .exe .hlp
.hta .inf .ini .ins .isp .jse? .lib .lnk .mdb .mde .mht .msc .msi
.msp .mst .ocx .pcd .pif .png .reg .scr .sct .shb .shs .sys
.url .vb .vbe .vbs .vxd .wab .wsc .wsf .wsh .zi .zip

There is also a 20 MB size limit on any attachments sent. The filter and the 20 MB attachment size limit will prevent most viruses from entering the SEU servers. If a sender tries to email an attachment larger than 20 MB from their SEU account then they will receive an error message.

If someone attempts to send an attachment with any of these extensions, then the message and the attachment will be removed from our email server. If you need to send a file with one of these extensions you will need to rename the file before sending it or find an alternative means of delivering the file.

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