Improvements to EagleMail settings will take place on Saturday, May 18. Eastern Michigan University’s executive Director of Media Relations, Geoff Larcom, issued a campus-wide email on April 29 outlining the changes.
The two main focus areas are emailing to large classes and neutralizing spammers.
“We heard from several faculty that some of our email limits were constraining their ability to email students in large classes. It also prevented some students from submitting all of their course work electronically. This required faculty to send multiple emails to reach one audience, or students to send multiple emails to include all of their attached assignments,” Larcom said in the email.
The previous email recipient limit was 50 and will be expanded to 300. The attachment space will also be broadened to include 80 MB of space rather than the previous 50 MB. Emails that need to include more than 300 recipients will continue to use EMU’s Email List Services (emich.edu/it/services/emaillists).
“[The] EagleMail system is bombarded with thousands of spam, viruses and phishing attempts every day; accounting for 80 percent of inbound email volume,” Larcom said. “While we are able to block the majority of these malicious emails, there are still several that get past our defenses.”
The result is that at least one account is being hijacked each day by spammers and emich.edu is being classified as a spam site.
To minimize the negative impact on legitimate emails sent by students, faculty and staff, a single account will be limited to sending no more than 500 messages in an hour and outbound filtering for spam and viruses will be put in place.
