E-Mail Safety
Phishing Emails
Phishing usually arrive in the form of an e-mail. Please disregard the phishing "hoax" e-mail - they contain bogus warnings usually intent only on frightening or misleading users. The best course of action is to merely delete this phishing e-mail. Although it is possible to be e-mailed an infected executable file or document containing a macro virus, by simply reading your e-mail, you will not get a computer virus. You would have to open the file attachment to actually get a virus. Therefore, precautions should be taken when dealing with such attachments. See St. Edward's e-mail attachment policy below for information on attachments that are automatically discarded because of their potential to carry viruses and worms.
If you receive notice of a virus via e-mail, please forward it to the Help Desk so that it can be checked out.
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.
Attachments removal from email
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
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.
Attachment Size Limit
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.