All information pertaining to Commencement is sent to your luc.edu email address.  All graduates should receive an email fromcommencement@luc.edu with instructions for how to register to attend your ceremony.  If you have not received an email with these instructions, please go through the following steps:

1. Check with your Dean’s office to make sure your luc.edu email address is correct, and that at least one communication has gone out.
2. Go through the following steps to make sure that your invitation email has not been filtered as Spam.
3. If your luc.edu email is being forwarded please make sure all your settings are correct based on this information.
4. If none of the above steps remedy your problem please contact technical support at extension 4-4444 or phone number (773) 508-4ITS.

SPAM   

What is spam?

The generally accepted definition of spam is that it is an email message which is both bulk and unsolicited. "Unsolicited” messages are those that the Recipient has not granted verifiable permission for the message to be sent. A “Bulk” message is sent as part of a larger collection of messages, all having substantively identical content.
http://www.spamhaus.org/definition.html

So an unsolicited message that is sent directly to you, which could be viewed as the equivalent to a "cold call" from a salesperson, is not spam. Similarly, a message sent to a discussion list is bulk, but is not spam.

Why can't you just stop spam?

The short answer is that the only way to stop all spam is to stop all email. The long answer is a bit more complicated. Spammers make money from the number of people who choose to purchase their product. They know that a very small percentage of the people who receive their spam will purchase the product. During the recent trial of Jeremy Jaynes, who was convicted under a federal anti-spam law, it was revealed that he typically sent out over 10 million spam emails every day. The response rate to spam was around one response per 30,000 spam messages, so the more messages a spammer can successfully send to live email accounts, the more likely they are to make money. This leads to a never-ending battle between spamming techniques and spam filtering techniques. As we begin to identify new ways to block spam, the spammers are creating new techniques to get past our blocks and into your inbox. Another concern with filtering messages is creating what are known as false positives. A false positive is a message that is tagged as spam, but was actually a message that you wanted to receive. There is a balancing act when setting the threshold for identifying a message as spam between blocking as many messages as possible while not marking any legitimate messages as spam.

What is Loyola doing about spam?

SpamAssassin

Loyola runs a product called Spam Assassin to attempt to identify spam messages in your email. Any message that Spam Assassin identifies as spam is marked with a [SPAM] tag in the subject line. This allows you to easily identify spam messages, and configure rules to automatically delete the spam if you want. We do not automatically delete messages that are believed to be spam because they could be false positives, as described above.

Blocking List

We also subscribe to SpamCop's BL (Blocking List) which lists IP addresses that have been reported to be used by spammers.  As mail comes in, it is checked against the SCBL, and any messages sent from listed addresses are blocked.  The SCBL is time-based, resulting in quick and automatic delisting of reported sites when reports stop.

MailFoundry

On Saturday July 26 a new spam blocking device, the MailFoundry, was added to our current detection system.  The MailFoundry Anti-Spam appliance is a complete email security system that works by routing your email to MailFoundry’s appliance where it is cleaned before being sent back to Loyola’s email servers. Benefits of using the MailFoundry include; protection against new email threats as they happen in real-time from around the world, reduced number of spam messages received, reduced number of false positives, and reliable virus filtering.
You will receive a daily digest report containing email messages quarantined from the MailFoundry around 7am each morning. The daily quarantine digests should be viewed for false positives, which is email detected as spam that is not spam. The digest will contain the following options for each email:

1. View – allows you to view the contents of a message in quarantine
2. Release – sends the quarantined message directly to your inbox
3. Release & Report – sends the quarantined message to your inbox after reporting it to the MailFoundry as not spam

Because you must wait until you receive your next quarantine digest to release a false positive, there will typically be a one day delay for such messages.  
No action is needed to block spam mail.
Frequently Asked Questions about the MailFoundry can be found www.luc.edu/its/security/mailfoundry.shtml.

What can I do to decrease the amount of spam I receive?

It is almost impossible to receive no spam mail. The goal is to reduce the amount of spam that you see, which can be helped by;
Move suspected spam to a Junk Mail folder or automatically delete suspected spam from your inbox
Block the sender and/or domain

If you are accessing your email through GroupWise, instead of just deleting a spam message, select Actions -> Junk Mail -> Block Sender. This will bring up a dialog box asking if you want to block the sender or the entire domain. If the sender belongs to a domain which might contain people who will send you non-spam messages (like hotmail.com or yahoo.com), make sure that Block e-mail from this address is selected then click OK.

If the sender belongs to a domain which you don't expect to contain anyone you know (such as reikisource.com), select Block any email from this internet domain and click OK. 

This way, in addition to deleting the message, you will be decreasing the amount of spam you receive in the future.
There are also a number of proactive steps you can take to try and limit the amount of spam that you receive.

• Be careful with your email address.  Every time that your email address is registered with a company online or posted on a webpage, you are taking the risk that your email address will get onto a spammer's list.  The sad reality is that a large number of automated tools are constantly scanning the web looking for email addresses to populate spammers' email lists.
• If you can recognize that a message is clearly spam based on the subject line and the sender, don't open it. Tag it as junk mail using the steps outlined above or simply delete it, but don't open the message - no good can come from opening a spam message.

What if I forward my Loyola email to a Yahoo, Hotmail, or Gmail account?

As the email passes through Loyola's servers, it may be tagged as spam by our servers. Any messages that are believed to be spam will be tagged with [Spam] in the subject line. You can then configure rules within each service to automatically delete the spam messages. Please be aware that any messages sent directly to a non-Loyola account will not be examined for spam by Loyola, so you will have to rely on the spam-filtering tools of your service provider.

For Yahoo mail, perform the following steps:

• In Yahoo mail, click Mail Options
• Click Filters
• Click Add
• Name the filter Loyola Spam
• Under If all of the following rules are true... in the subject line, leave contains selected and enter [SPAM]
• Under Then, select Trash
• Click Add Filter
• When completed, you should see a rule that looks like this:
Loyola Spam

If...

     Subject contains "[SPAM]" 

Then...

     Move message to Trash folder

For Hotmail, perform the following steps:

• In Hotmail, click Options
• Click Custom Filters
• Click New Filter
• Under Identify incoming message which:, select have [blank] in the subject, and type [SPAM] in the blank
• Under Deliver these messages to the following folder:, select either Junk E-mail or Delete these messages
• Click OK 

For Gmail, perform the following steps:

• In Gmail, click Create a filter
• On the subject line, enter [SPAM] 
• Click Next step 
• Click Move it to the Trash
• Click Create Filter

EMAIL ROUTING   

Routing your email is a 2-step process.
In PAM (personal account manager) you change the email address to your forwarding account, ie. gmail, hotmail, etc. and then you need to log into GroupWise web access and create a rule.
 

First Step: change your email address in Personal Account Manager (PAM)

1. Go to:   https://pellonia.luc.edu/iuadmin and click on "manage your account"
2. enter your username in the top box and click next
3. click on your username in step 2 (at the stoplight)
4. enter your password
5. scroll all the way down to the bottom and in the "e-mail address" box.. enter your full email address for your other account,  ie., name@gmail.com,  name@att.net, name@comcast,net... etc.
6. click the "save" button at the top

This completes step 1. 

Second Step:  Create a rule in GroupWise web access

1. Log into GroupWise Web Access
2. upper right corner.. click on "options"
3. click on the "rules" tab
4. TYPE:  "rules"  click on create
5. Rule Name:  give it any name you want...i.e., Forward to my XXXX account
6. To:  Enter your full email address for your other account,  ie.,  name@gmail.com,  name@att.net, name@comcast,net... etc.
7. click "save"
8. A message box will pop up.. its a warning that is telling you every email you get will be forwarded.... click "ok"
9. click "save" again.   Your rule is now complete.  You will see the rule name and a "check" in the box indicating it is active.

If you want to stop using it, remove the check and delete.