With only five minutes and a few clicks, students at the University could become personal shoppers, survey takers and more. At least, that’s what the millions of phishing e-mails sent in bulk to University e-mail addresses promise.

University Police recently sent out a warning to the University community about potential e-mail scams, including unsolicited offers of employment.

The University e-mail system catches billions of spam messages each year. Students can decide which e-mails are junk through ‘safe lists.’

And Enterprise Information Technology Services reports that of the 4.9 million messages sent daily to the University, 4.3 million of those are spam. But with the new UGAMail system, scam e-mails flooding student inboxes slowed significantly.

“One-and-a-half billion spam messages are blocked annually to UGA,” said Shawn Ellis, director of EITS client services. “Our No. 1 issue right now is false positives because the new e-mail system is quite a bit better at blocking e-mails, so much so that it blocks things that are trying to get through.”

Recently, the new e-mail system stopped messages sent from Kennesaw State University, but EITS repaired the problem by adding KSU to the safe-sender list.

Students can decide whether e-mails are junk or not by actively checking their junk mail folder.

“The user has the power to safe list any user or any sender,” Ellis said. “They just right-click and mark ‘not junk’ to safe list it.”

Ellis said the power of Microsoft’s junk mail filter does not come from individual users, but from the sheer numbers now signed up for the UGAMail, or Live@edu, program.

According to Microsoft’s website, more than 5,000 institutions in 105 countries contracted with Microsoft for the Live@edu program.

Microsoft blocks junk mail by identifying senders that are consistently identified as spammers, then prevents the spammers from contacting any Microsoft accounts.

“We’re just a drop in their bucket and Microsoft uses everyone to determine what is junk mail,” Ellis said. “If we were just doing it on our own, it would be more difficult because there’s only 83,000 users here.”

With the University’s switch to Live@edu, users of UGAMail gained more than just increased junk mail protection — they joined a cloud computing network that Barbara White, the University’s chief information officer, determined to be cost-efficient and user friendly. Put simply, cloud computing programs provide structure when all users of a product, such as UGAMail, access it the same way online.

“This means cheap services because everyone’s on the same infrastructure,” Ellis said.

The cost to migrate existing accounts to Live@edu totaled roughly $390,000. The annual upkeep costs — including updates — total about $75,000, Ellis said.

In the year-long planning process to adopt the new e-mail system, the Student Government Association and the University administration approved the costs.

“This was an institutional decision and that’s something I think that’s really important,” White said. “We worked a great deal with student government, and it is not just a top-end decision.”

When Microsoft updates Live@edu, the live service will also automatically update UGAMail accounts without the University needing to spend time or money on updates.

“The service is very live, and one of the advantages of going to the cloud is that we get free updates,” Ellis said. “The flipside to that is, when we do, UGA has to come along. There’ll be some changes by the end of the year, like the ability to integrate your personal calendar with the web calendar.”

Despite budget cuts from the University, Ellis said White and EITS continue to look for ways to modernize technology on campus including updating the telephone system and investing in web security.

“We participated in the budget cuts, but the institution recognized what we need to do with technology and has been really good to work with,” White said. “We are very conscious of efficiency, opportunity and how we can do more.”