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Printer-Friendly ModeITS installs new e-mail spam filter
January 17, 2005 —
"Do you want to know how you can consolidate your debt?"
"Do you want to claim your free trip to Hawaii that you just won as the one-millionth customer?"
"Would you like to claim a free DVD player after you fill out a short survey?"
Similar to its processed and canned cousin, e-mail spam is annoying at the least, and has potential for great harm. Over the holiday break, SVSU bolstered its CardMail system's defense against these unsolicited e-mails in an effort to bring their students a more efficient e-mail system.
According to the Spamhaus Project, the word spam in relation to e-mail means Unsolicited Bulk Email, or UBE. An e-mail is "spam" if two conditions are met: the recipient's personal identity and context are irrelevant because the message is equally applicable to many other potential recipients, and the recipient has not verifiably granted deliberate, explicit, and still-revocable permission for it to be sent.
"What the industry has done is develop a new class of systems that scan incoming e-mail using some fairly sophisticated algorithms.
Such a system is critical for SVSU students and staff to be able to continue to use e-mail," says Ken Schindler, Executive Director of Information Technology Services.
"If the message is probably spam, the system inserts ***PossibleSpam*** in the subject line," Schindler says. "This allows everyone to write a rule to route these to a special spam folder for later review."
However, if an e-mail message contains malicious content, then more drastic action is taken.
"The system blocks and rejects various messages that have viruses or certain forbidden types of attachments that are known to contain embedded viruses," Schindler says.
If an e-mail is rejected, students are informed by a message that an email has been blocked. This message also supplies the source of the message, just in case the e-mail was not actually spam.
"(Spam) is an obvious, colossal waste of everyone's time to wade through the spam to get to their 'real' e-mail," Schindler says.