Spamnation! Goodbye, Roaring Penguin and Hello, FOPE

Back in September 2012, the Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO) released an announcement that it soon would be replacing Ohio State’s current anti-spam service, CanIT (which uses Roaring Penguin anti-spam software) with another service, FOPE (Forefront Online Protection for Exchange).

If you used the CanIT website to help you eliminate e-mail spam, you may have whitelisted and blacklisted addresses and domains in CanIT that you can maintain by moving them to the University E-Mail Service–but you will only have access to CanIT until Friday, November 30 to take these steps, and clean up any remaining quarantined messages.

The OCIO has prepared a Knowledge Base article with easy-to-follow instructions about how to move your whitelist and blacklist from CanIT to Outlook 2010/2007. Please note that although the instructions are clear, the process can be time-consuming. The OCIO cautions that “[d]epending on how many entries you have, you may wish to make a note of the senders and domains in CanIT and manually move them.”

Ohio State has already begun using FOPE. This means that in units that already migrated to the University E-mail Service, e-mail messages with a high spam detection score are being diverted to users’ Junk E-mail folders. For this reason, faculty and staff should regularly monitor their Junk E-mail folders for valid e-mail messages that were marked as spam. Need some help managing your Junk E-mail? Another OCIO Knowledge Base article about  Junk E-mail settings includes links to more information about managing your safe senders (whitelist) and blocked senders (blacklist) options in your unit’s version of Outlook.