School of Medicine

SOM Mail servers

The School of Medicine MSIS Department runs a Microsoft Exchange mail system for housing mailboxes, and a Sendmail system as the med.wayne.edu email gateway. 

The Exchange system provides access to SoM Exchange Mailboxes using Outlook, and any pop/imap protocol clients such as Entourage for Macintosh. You can also gain access to your SoM Exchange Mailbox using a web browser via the Outlook Web Access page.

Antivirus Protections for Email

MSIS Networking takes a three-tier approach to email-born viruses. 

• Client or Workstation Protection
• Mailbox Server Protection
• Mail Gateway Protection

Client or workstation protection is that method that protects individual workstations. This includes the installation and maintenance of Antivirus software on the individual workstations. The University currently has a site-license with Symantec for Norton Antivirus Corporate. Many if not most of the SOM workstations should have this software. In addition, due to problems with individuals manually updating the Antivirus definitions, SOM Networking setup a the corporate system to take over management of the workstation antivirus software to ensure that definitions are getting updated every day. Besides protecting the workstation from viruses from the Web or from removable media, it can provide a last ditch effort at protecting the workstation from a virus via email, especially if the individual isn't using an SOM Email account.

Mailbox Server Protection only applies to the Exchange Servers. These systems currently run Norton Antivirus for Exchange which watches email for viruses within the Exchange system. So if a user who doesn't have adequate workstation protection and uses an Exchange account were to send a virus infected message, then the Norton Antivirus for Exchange should catch it. People who have mailboxes still on the old unix-Eeyore system, are not protected by any mailbox Antivirus software.

Mail Gateway Protection applies to all mail that passes thru the smtp.med.wayne.edu gateway. All med.wayne.edu directed email passes thru this system so all incoming messages are scanned for viruses using Open Source program called MailScanner and ClamAV Antivirus. MailScanner also restricts certain attachments types. To see the list of restricted windows attachment types, please check the current list. 

All mail that is relayed or bounced thru the SOM Mail Gateway (smtp.med.wayne.edu) are scanned as well. Since many Pop & Imap email clients send their outgoing mail thru the gateway, this will insure that those outgoing messages are getting scanned in case they don't have adequate workstation protection.

Message Size Restrictions

In accordance with the general practice of all internet email systems, the sizes of messages are restricted to 20 megabytes. This means that if a message contains an attachment that is larger than 20 megs, it will be refused to be delivered. If you need to send those type of attachments via email then you'll need to zip them up using Aladdin Expander or WinZip to compress the attachment. 

Simple Message Transfer Protocol (SMTP) was never intended to be a method of file transfer. That's what the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) was designed to do. The problems associated with sending large attachments is that:

1. Depending on the size, it can can take a long time to transfer a large message.
2. While a system is trying to send a large message, all other email is queued up behind it.
3. Depending on the memory and file storage of both the sending and receiving system, the systems could run into problems.
4. Since there is a practice of mailbox size quotas on most systems on the internet, you could end up causing someone's mailbox to fill up. This is a problem if their system administrators don't allow them to go over their quota which prevents them from receiving any more mail.

If you need to send or receive a file attachment that will exceed the 20MB size limit, it is suggested to use the School of Medicine File Transfer Service. Additional information about the service is available from the following web site: https://w3.med.wayne.edu/somfits/