URBANA — Two things were clear in the first test of the new emergency alert system at the University of Illinois on Thursday:

a) Problems with text alerts seem to have been mostly resolved.

b) The UI's spam filters work very well — enough to delay for an hour or more email alerts sent to the UI's own @illinois.edu addresses.

Spokeswoman Robin Kaler said the new Rave Mobile Safety emergency alert system "worked beautifully," sending text messages out immediately at 10 a.m.

But it also ran into a roadblock with the UI's spam filters, something information technology specialists had expected, she said.

"We have pretty tight spam filtering at the university, as you might imagine. By holding the test we were able to see how we have to change settings on our spam filtering to allow Rave messages to go through," Kaler said.

External email messages to one recipient who also works at The News-Gazette arrived within three minutes, and a text alert arrived almost immediately. The @illinois.edu email was also time-stamped 10:02:47 — the moment it got to the UI system from Rave, Kaler said — but it didn't reach the recipient until 11:03 a.m.

"It was stopped by the UI's spam filters," Kaler said. "The technicians are changing those settings so it won't get caught in that filter and it'll get through."

Another test is planned soon to ensure the problem is resolved, she said.

The problem was discovered at 10:45 a.m., and the spam service manager began releasing the messages manually, she said. But technicians noticed that the delivery rate was still slow.

They concluded that the number of connections from Rave's servers to the UI system was inadequate, Kaler said. Once that problem was corrected at 11:45 a.m., the delivery rate tripled, she said.

A check a couple of hours after the test showed that 99,361 of the 116,415 emails sent out (about 85 percent) were delivered in 1 hour, 52 minutes and 29 seconds. Of the 17,000 that weren't delivered, many belonged to students who have graduated or whose mailboxes are full, for example. The list will be updated for the fall semester, she said.

Texts were sent to 24,610 phone numbers — belonging to students, parents, employees, spouses and others — and 85 percent were delivered within 1 minute 17 seconds, 95 percent within 4 minutes and 46 seconds. Of the total, 92 were bad phone numbers and 508 were still pending, most likely for users who had their phones turned off or were out of range, Kaler said.

Kaler said the university is in a transition time for students right now, but "during the school year, when our list is cleaner, we'd expect many fewer failures."

A 100 percent success rate is probably unrealistic, which is why the university has several ways to alert people during emergencies, including phone calls, she said.

The Rave system also uses campus websites to display emergency messages as needed, and posts emergency information on Facebook and Twitter.

"This is one component of our communications system," she said. "The idea is to reach you with at least one."

The goal is to be able to reach 95 percent of the people within six minutes through all of its emergency notification methods, Kaler said.

The bigger challenge, she said, will be to get everyone on campus to supply as much information as possible so they can be sure information will reach them one way or the other, she said.

Internal email should be the fastest "because we control the entire system," she said.

Under the old Illini Alert system the @illinois.edu emails went out almost instantaneously, but mass text messages were delivered sporadically because phone-service providers would send them out in batches. That's no longer an issue because the new system moves the alerts to "the front of the line," Kaler said.

The UI signed a two-year contract with Rave Mobile Safety in late June, and officials hope to have testing completed sometime in the fall. The emergency notification system is administered by the Division of Public Safety.

The Facebook page for Illini Alert is http://www.facebook.com/illinialert. The Twitter account can be monitored by following @IlliniAlert.